


Embers

by Wakefire



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Action/Adventure, Crime Fighting, Demisexual Lin Beifong, F/F, Femslash, Lin gets a hot young woman because sweet justice, Older Woman/Younger Woman, Romance, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-07
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-20 06:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 51,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2419088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wakefire/pseuds/Wakefire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being the Chief of Police and protecting the Republic city, Lin Beifong has no time for the matters of the heart. But as the Equalist threat rises, so do her feelings for Kira, a once runaway street kid turned into a friend. But what exactly is Kira's connection to the non-bending extremists, and what does it mean to their relationship?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic back when Season 1 was airing, but only now decided to finally start publishing it. Originally I fell in love with Lin's character and wanted to write her someone that adores her like she deserved to be adored, but then the idea spawned an actual plot. (A fair warning, this story will be quite long.)
> 
> A word about the format: the prologue and the first tree chapters will be set a certain amount of years before the beginning of the series, respectively. I realize it might seem like a huge load of backstory, but it's all part of the story and integral to the development of Kira's character and her relationship with Lin.
> 
> Reviews are much appreciated. (I eat them for breakfast.)

**PROLOGUE: Waterdrops**

 

_13 years ago_

 

Water glimmered in sunlight as it flowed serenely along the creek, circling around the rock that stuck above the surface, blissfully unaware of its impending fate until a pair of feet jumped into it and splashed it all around. For a moment the air over the water burned, boiling hot around the gathering flames until they shot forward, scorching the splashed drops in its way and ending in a satisfying fizz twenty feet or so away.

"Well? Did I hit it? Did I hit it?" the little girl asked, jumping up and down while she tried to untangle the piece of cloth tied around her head. "Tell me, I can't see with this blindfold on!"

"Isn't that the point of being blindfolded?" teased the boy standing on the dry grass beside the creek. Excluding the difference in hairstyles, everything about him – from the amber of his skin to jet black hair and bright, golden eyes – was the spitting image of her.

"Stop being an ostrich horse's ass, Haru, and just tell me!"

The boy laughed. "Okay, you hit it, alright!"

The girl finally got off the blindfold and her face broke into a wide, partially toothless smile at the sight of the rock in the middle of the river. Or more precisely, the heap of ashes on the rock that had just a few seconds ago been a crudely human-shaped doll made of straw and wigs.

"Alright! I am a firebending master!" she proclaimed, pulling all four feet of herself into multiple poses. "I'm the Avatar, bitches!"

The boy on ground crossed his arms and huffed. "You can't be the Avatar, doofus!"

"Says who?" the girl asked.

"Says that Aang was still alive when we were born!" he argued. "Think about it, Kira."

The girl stopped flailing around and pouted in deep concentration. "Well... maybe I'm so good, I'm early?" She stuck her tongue out. "I'm still a better bender than you, ostrich horse's ass."

"No way!"

"Yes way!"

"Yelling 'yes way' doesn't make it any truer!" Haru rolled his eyes as his sister trudged out of the creek and wrung water out of her pant legs. "Come on, we gotta get back, dinner's gonna be ready soon."

Kira shook her upside-down head. "I wanna practice more. The bending competition is next week and I still haven't perfected my killer moves."

"But you know dad doesn't like us bending by ourselves in the forest! If you set something on fire again, he's gonna be so mad."

"He won't know if no-one tells him," she remarked in a sing-song voice, the obvious threat sparkling in her eyes. "Seriously, if you tell him I'm so gonna scorch you."

Haru waved his hand dismissively. "Whatever. I'm going home, you stay here. Just know that I'm not gonna make excuses for you."

"Fine, you go!"

"I'm going!"

"Fine!"

"Fine!"

Kira breathed heavily, her brow furrowed as she watched her brother's back. She muttered unflattering things beneath her breath and kicked a pine cone; it flew into the bushes in a beautiful arc. Then she shook her limbs to relax them, fell into yet another pose and ignited fire upon her palm.

A twig snapped.

Reflexively, with the instinct of generations of bred warriors, she turned around and shot. Fire erupted from her palm, speeding through the air like a baseball. The man standing on the twig dodged it casually by leaning slightly to the left. Kira gasped.

"You should be more careful with your fireballs, sweetie," the man said. His voice was muffled by the blue cloth over his mouth and nose, which together with his robe in the same color hid most of his face. Even though Kira couldn't see anything of the man save his eyes, she was sure she had never met him before; he even sounded foreign.

"I'm sorry," she said, although her eyes narrowed and a pout rose on her lips. "Who are you and why are you on our land?"

"Aren't you a curious little thing?" the man asked and chuckled behind the cloth.

Maybe it was just all the warnings about strangers or a childish, base suspicion, but there was something about his chuckle that made shivers run down Kira's spine and her feet start stepping backwards without conscious effort. She got one step back, two, three before she suddenly found she couldn't move anymore. Every muscle in her body was frozen solid like she had been encased in ice. She tried to bend, but none of her fingers produced so much as a twitch. The suspicion turned into naked fear and Kira struggled to fill her lungs with air, although it felt, by spirits, like she couldn't even  _breathe_  properly. She stared up at the man who did nothing more than stand there, one of his hands raised as if about to strike her.

"What are you doing?" she screamed. " _Hel-!_ "

That same hand slammed over her mouth and effectively muffled her cries. The man knelt beside her and brushed a lock of hair out of her face, unaffected by the way her pupils turned into tiny fearful dots.

"Tell me... that boy who was here, he's your brother, isn't he?" he asked, his voice a low rumble in her ears. Too afraid to tell a blatant lie, Kira nodded for what the grip allowed. "Now here's what we're going to do. I will let go, and you will stay put. And you won't scream. Because if you scream, your brother might hear and rush to your rescue, and we wouldn't want anything to happen to him, would we?"

Kira's eyes went, if possible, even wider. A cold feeling that had nothing to do with her paralyzed limbs enveloped her heart, stinging like tiny needless in its racing center. Slowly, as if the universe itself had decelerated in that moment, she squeezed her eyes shut, a drop of water rolling down her cheek and onto the hand over her mouth. She nodded.

Again the man smiled – somehow, she could  _hear_  it through the cloth – and slowly detached his hand from her mouth. At the same time, she felt the grip on her limbs fading away. "I didn't hear that, what were you saying?"

"Okay," Kira whispered, her voice cracking as it hit the lump forming in her throat. Her legs trembled, but otherwise she stood absolutely still as the man stood up, his blue form towering over her. "What are you gonna do to me?"

The man raised his hand again and Kira flinched, but he merely pressed his thumb against her forehead, almost gently. "Don't worry," he said. "This will only hurt for a moment."


	2. Oranges

**CHAPTER ONE: Oranges**

**  
**

_10 years ago_

_  
_

It was an ordinary Monday morning in the Republic City. Cars were rolling along the streets, vendors were trying to outyell each other's offers, the sun was blasting merrily from the bright blue sky and threatened to boil Lin inside her armor. Its doubling as a kettle was one of the few, but very obvious disadvantages of being encased in steel and thick leather from the neck down. Had she been one of the less motivated police officers, she might have theoretically considered ditching her arm guards or some other part of the uniform. But she was Lin Beifong, and she wore an impeccable uniform all day, every day, even when it was boiling hot.

"Thief!"

Apparently, the armor would be needed.

Lin jogged around the corner. There was a small grocery store there, the kind with a door and one measly window in its front side. She heard more yelling from the inside, the sound of wood smashing into something and... was that an entire shelf falling over? Then, before she could take a single step towards the open doorway, a red blur crashed through the window, shattering glass and melons all over the paving. The blur threw a somersault and landed more or less on its feet, but the following vendor was less lucky; trying to swing a broom as he jumped, the man got caught in the window frame by his stomach.

There was a fleeting moment of general 'what on earth just happened' where everything stood perfectly still. The blur turned its head from the stuck vendor to Lin, and she realized 'it' was a skinny, black-haired boy in red robes who couldn't be more than thirteen years old. He was holding a bag bursting with food in one hand, and his eyes flew open as he registered the police uniform.

 _Really? This was what I signed up for?_  Lin thought, but then the boy sprang, and she flicked her wrist reflexively, almost casually. A metallic wire shot towards the boy's sprinting feet and circled around them. It was such a routine move that the possibility of it failing hadn't even occurred to her, but somehow he managed to jump like a bull antelope and evade the wires closing in around his feet. Her eyes widened and then turned into slits as he ran on and disappeared around the next corner.

"What are you waiting for? Catch him! He stole my best oranges!" the vendor yelled, his voice a little hindered by his effort to get unstuck from the window frame.

"What do you think I'm doing?" Lin spat in frustration before she sprinted after the thief. This had got to be in the top five ways in how she didn't want to spent an excruciatingly hot Monday morning.

Luckily the boy hadn't got that far; Lin could still spot him in the alley. She dodged a stray cat as she increased her speed until she was close enough for the wires to reach. But again, the boy looked behind his shoulder and dodged the wires by an inch, and she had to stop to detach their sharp ends from the stone wall before she could continue. Lin cursed out loud.

The alley opened to a wide four lane street bustling with nine o'clock traffic. The choir of honking grew in volume when the thief ran straight to the street and Lin followed suit. Either the boy was incredibly foolhardy, risking to be ran over for a bag of groceries, or alternatively pretty smart, realizing that she couldn't bend in the middle of a busy street without risking to scrap some taxpayer's car. She tried her best to murder the brat with a mere gaze as she barely dodged a car, the same one whose hood he had jumped over just three second before. And now he was running right to the rails of an incoming tram.

"Stop, you idiot!" Lin yelled, because while she wanted to kill the kid at this point, she didn't want him to  _die_. But either he was deaf or just giving her a middle finger of a response as he increased his speed and miraculously brushed past the tram rain by a hair's length. Lin grimaced as she hopped aboard the moving wagon from one side, muttered some 'excuse me's as she tossed people out of her way and leaped out from the other side, just in time to catch a sight of a corner of red cloth vanishing into another alley, one that she knew was a dead-end.

When she arrived at the alley, she saw the thief climbing up a fire ladder, holding the bag by his teeth. A fire ladder made of metal, attached onto a concrete wall. Lin smiled dryly as she waved a hand and the ladder bent like melted butter, causing the boy to lose his foothold and hang on the step by his hands. She shot a couple of wires to his general direction, to make sure he wouldn't fall down twenty feet on his head -

As something warm and clammy hit her face and made her lose both her concentration and her eyesight. Incredulous, Lin wiped egg white from her eyes and gritted her teeth. Meanwhile, the brat managed to scramble on top of the remaining ladder and haul himself on the rooftop.

That was it, the brat was officially dead. Wiping the residue egg from her palm on her sleeve, Lin used the ladder to swing herself on the rooftop. The boy startled as he saw her and began his sprint towards the other end of the roof, but Lin raised a single, strategically placed tile in his way. His right foot tripped on it and he fell gloriously, right over his face judging by the yelp. He still tried to crawl away, but she shot wires at him for the fourth time and tangled him up good.

"Give it up, it's over," Lin said as he still tried to struggle free.

"Ngggh," the thief replied, knuckles bone white as he pulled at the unrelenting steel. The reality of the situation eventually dawned on him as he stopped struggling, dropped the grocery bag and curled into a little ball, hiding his face behind his hands. The voice coming from behind the hands was high-pitched and wailing. "Okay, okay, I'll give it back. I'll give it all back – and I'll fix the window – just please don't hurt me, please."

The pleading continued as a lonely orange rolled slowly along the roof. Curious and admittedly, quite satisfied about the change of tone, Lin loosened the wires a little bit as she walked towards the culprit. He lowered his trembling hands a bit and stared at her wide-eyed, and suddenly she realized something that made her stop in her tracks. Well, two things, more correctly.

One, that 'he' was actually a young girl with a short and quite messy haircut.

And two, that the girl was absolutely terrified of her.

The first surprise Lin could set off with a shrug. The latter, however, was more difficult to understand. She had tied the girl up but that was standard procedure, that wasn't a sufficient reason for all that shaking and whimpering and the pure, unbridled terror shining in her eyes. Lin was well aware she could be intimidating but come on, that was ridiculous.

"Hold your horses," Lin said, the worst of her irritation faded from her voice. "It's not like you murdered anyone, you just stole a few oranges. Come on." She waved her hand and the wiring shifted, forcing the still trembling girl onto her feet. "Let's get you down from here. I'll let you walk if you promise not to try anything stupid."

The subjugated state of her prisoner lasted for the entirety of the trip back to the police headquarters and not a minute longer. Lin threw the girl into an interrogation chamber and went to wash off the remains of dried egg from her face and hair. When she came back, she found the girl curled up in her chair, hood pulled over her head and the rigidity of her posture signaling the air of being extremely pissed off. Lin huffed. What was the girl thinking, that the robe was some kind of an invisibility cloak?

Lin bent the door closed in her wake and slammed the notepad on the table. The girl turned her head away in indignation as the police officer dropped down on the seat at the opposite end of the table. Lin tilted her head and snapped her fingers, causing the wire around the girl's wrists to undo itself. There was no thanks, just an annoyed glare as the girl rubbed the feeling back in her hands.

"So," Lin started, "Mr. Miyagi is very enthusiastic about pressing charges for the broken window and the loss of..." She read the text on the notepad. "Three oranges, two eggs and a bottle of milk, among other things. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

She still didn't receive a verbal answer, just a shrug. Lin gritted her teeth and rubbed her forehead, her fingers hitting another missed spot with dried egg white on it. She picked it out, her frown deepening, and regretted not transferring this case to some unfortunate rookie.

"It's an easy question," she continued to the brick wall of a brat. "Why did you steal from his shop? For fun? Or did someone tell you to?"

"I was hungry, okay?" the girl snapped. "No other reason."

She curled tighter in her chair, holding her knees against her chest. It happened that a low, long rumble escaped from the girl's stomach, echoing loudly in the metallic room. She bit the nail of her thumb to hide her cringe.

 _Wow, she really is hungry._  As an idea occurred to her, Lin bent the door open as she heard another officer's approaching footsteps. The fellow peeked into the room.

"Noga. What's in the canteen today?" she asked.

"Um... beef and mushroom, I think," the officer replied.

Lin nodded. "Bring a plate here, will you?"

The man left, a slightly puzzled expression on his face. The girl looked at the open doorway with widened eyes, but when Lin caught her staring, she turned her head away and sunk, if possible, even lower in her chair. Unimpressed by her behavior, Lin crossed her arms and studied her prisoner. The girl was skinny and looked like she hadn't seen a bathtub for a while. What was visible of her skin had a slightly golden hue, a color which only multiplied in the eyes glaring at her angrily from beneath the mess of black hair.

"You look like you're from the Fire Nation," Lin remarked.

"So?" the girl spat.

"Are you?"

"...Yeah."

Lin huffed. What was it about this girl that was incapable of sentences longer than one syllable? "Your attitude could be better," she said dryly.

"What do you expect? I just got caught by someone old enough to be my mom," the girl grumbled.

Well, that was not the kind of more-than-one-syllable response she had wanted. Lin's eyebrows furrowed and she was about to shoot back something very unfriendly when Noga came back with a food tray. Everything about the girl livened up suddenly, her nose peeking out from under the hood like a dog's muzzle.

"Here you go, Chief," Noga said, laid the tray on the table and left. Lin pushed the food tray towards the girl, not that she was sure the brat deserved it anymore. The girl's eyes shifted between the tray and the police officer, suspicion and hunger fighting over her expression in a way that was almost comical.

"Eat," Lin urged. "It's no use to me if you collapse in the middle of the interrogation. It's not poisoned, for gods' sake!"

The girl looked like she really, really wanted to refuse, but a thin trail of saliva had begun to gather at the corner of her mouth. Like a feral animal, she lunged at the tray and grabbed a piece of bread, cramming it whole in her mouth before it could be taken away from her. She coughed up a little and had to beat her chest not to choke on the bread, after which she continued feeding at a slightly less frantic pace. Lin smiled and grabbed the notepad again.

"Let's start with something easy," she said. "What's your name?"

"Khih-" The girl paused, gulped down some water and swallowed a big piece of mushroom. "Kira. My name's Kira."

That sounded believable enough by what Lin knew of Fire Nation names. She wrote it down. "How old are you?"

"Twelve."

Lin marked the number in another column. "What are your parents' names?"

The chopsticks stopped in mid-air and the hood seemed to drop lower by itself. "I don't have any," the girl muttered before stuffing her mouth with food again.

Lin's pen halted. "What about your other relatives? Or your guardians, anyhow?"

Kira shook her head in a barely visible gesture. Lin sighed again, because this was going absolutely nowhere.

"Well, where do you live?"

The girl shrugged. "Wherever," she mumbled and reached for the glass again.

It was only then, as the right hand extended from beneath the sleeve, that Lin spotted it: an irregular, bright red mark on the back of the hand, continuing on to the wrist before it disappeared under clothing. Lin would have recognized that kind of mark anywhere; she had met Zuko enough times not to forget his.

It was burned.

"Who did that to you?" Lin asked.

Kira startled and retrieved her hand quickly, the glass almost falling over as it hit the tray. "Nobody," she said far too quickly.

"Don't lie to me."

"I'm not lying! I – I poured hot water on it, it was an accident."

Lin gave the girl a sardonic glare, because that was the worst lie of the century, but Kira didn't budge. She took the half-empty food bowl and curled up in her seat again, as if she could hide and fade from sight behind her scraped knees. Lin was having a hard time deciding whether she was feeling sorry for the girl or growing mad at her utter lack of cooperation.

"Alright, here's the deal," Lin said, letting the notepad fall on the table as she leaned forward. "As much as Mr. Miyagi would like to see you prosecuted, you're too young to go to trial. Normally we would bill your guardians for the damage, but since you don't have any..." She let a hint of doubt creep into her voice, but got no response. "I'm going to contact the orphanage. They'll come pick you up."

"No!"

The bowl hit the floor with a loud clank, flying rice all over the floor, as Kira shot to her feet. She looked alight with panic and fury, her fingers digging into the table, like a lightning had just struck her.

"You can't do that!" the girl exclaimed, the pitch of her voice climbing up by at least an octave.

"I can and I will," Lin replied calmly. "It's standard procedure in cases like -"

"No, you don't understand!" Kira shouted. "I can't go there. I'll do anything – I'll get money somehow, I'll pay for the window – I'll never do anything bad ever again! Just please don't make me go to them."

Lin gazed at the girl curiously. Her golden eyes were glimmering in the green light of the room, every inch of her face etched with desperation.

"What's so bad about them?" she asked. "I know the system's not flawless, but -"

The girl bit her lip in hesitation, until she eventually took a deep breath and looked down on the floor. "Because I know how the system works. They'll check for missing kids, and then he – the one who did this to me -" she raised her right sleeve on purpose. "They'll give me back to  _him_."

A deep, profound silence descended in the room. Lin stared at kid in a temporary loss of words. It wasn't the first time she had to witness first-hand what kind of things some adults were ready to do to a mere child. It just never got any easier.

"But if I don't put you in the system, you can't get a roof over your head, either. Then where are you going to go?" she asked quietly.

Kira shrugged and smiled a small, mirthless smile that made her look years older for a split of a second. "Somewhere. Anywhere. I'll be alright, honest, just don't make me go back. I can't go back." She batted her watery eyes and casted a pleading look at the police officer, the kind that was specifically designed to wrench a heart out of its place. " _Please._ "

Lin turned her eyes away and huffed, crossing her arms. They stayed like that for the longest time, her sitting down and the girl perched over the edge of the table, waiting. Finally Lin waved her hand and Kira flinched, but no wires shot out; instead the door burst open.

"I'll let you off with a warning. But you need to behave, or you're going to the system faster than you can yell 'help!'"

The girl looked at the door and back at the police officer, her eyes as big as plates. "Really? You're just – letting me go?"

"Yes, really," Lin said. "Now  _go_  before I change my mind."

"Thank you thank you  _thank you_!" Kira giggled and bounced in place for a moment, rice gluing into the bottom of her sandals, during which Lin feared that she would jump over the table and hug her or something. Fortunately nothing like that happened, and the girl got herself back together. "You won't regret it!"

"Better not. I never want to see you again, you got that straight?" Lin asked sternly.

"Of course! Never! Promise!"

Kira nodded earnestly and sprang towards the doorway. However, she turned back after a couple of steps, grabbed the remaining piece of bread from the tray and grinned before she really left, almost silent footsteps fading into the corridor. Lin shook her head as she took the notepad and scribbled something vague under the column titled "Resolution". She had a bad feeling that someday she would come to regret this.


	3. Breaking

**CHAPTER TWO: Breaking**

 

_6 years ago_

 

The day had been largely uneventful until the afternoon when someone knocked on the Chief of Police's door. There had been some kind of a ruckus in the hall before that, but seeing that it was the police headquarters, there was always some kind of a ruckus in the hall. Lin raised her gaze from the paperwork when Officer Huang's head appeared in the doorway.

“Yes, what is it?” Lin prompted. She had too much work to do to waste time in people standing mute in her doorway.

“Eh, I'm sorry, Chief, but we caught the pair that had stolen that motorcycle,” Huang said, pulling at the neck of his uniform.

Lin raised an eyebrow. “And since when have you had to report the result of every investigation directly to me?” she asked.

“Oh no, Chief, that's not it,” Huang said quickly. “It's just that... well, one of them demands to speak to you. She's quite adamant about it.”

Before Lin had time to ask who could possibly deem herself that important, something pink pushed past the police officer in the doorway. That something turned out to be a teenaged girl in a bright pink skirt and jacket, and a complimenting, albeit fury-induced blush on her cheeks. Her hair was wound up in tight dark brown curls and she did look somehow familiar, although vaguely.

“This is an outrage!” the girl proclaimed. “My father would never allow this! Uncuff me immediately!”

She rattled her handcuffed wrists and looked at the Chief of Police with the kind of exasperated indignation that only a teenager could muster. Lin answered it with an unimpressed glare. Sometimes she couldn't believe her mother and mother's friends had been saving the world at that age.

“Mariko, shut up, you're making it worse!” yelled a different voice as yet another, darker-colored figure sneaked between the small space between Huang and the door. And this one – this one was definitely familiar. “Let me handle this.”

_Oh for the mother of gods -_

Girl number two stepped forth from behind the first girl's back, which had been a futile hiding place anyway because she was taller. She was dressed in black and dark blues from head to toe, but the smile that broke on her lips was all sparkle and sunshine.

“Chief Beifong, hi!” the girl said. “We haven't seen in, what, three weeks? It's been forever!”

“Kira,” Lin groaned, burying her face in her hands for the sheer amount of frustration that had just flowed into her.

“You know her?” wondered the other voice, far too audibly to be a genuine whisper. “So is she gonna release us or what?”

“I told you, shut up!”

Slowly, Lin uncovered her face and straightened her back. “Huang, you're dismissed,” she said, and the officer disappeared in record time, slamming the door closed after him. “You two, _sit down_.”

With the ease of someone perfectly accustomed to the situation, Kira walked over to the chair in front of the Chief's desk and dropped down on it, settling herself into a comfortable position. This Mariko girl, however, stared at the chair like it was dirty until Lin gave a little kick to the floor, causing the floor beneath the girl's feet to tremor just enough to send her on her behind in the chair.

“Now,” Lin said as she leaned on her elbows, “whose fantastic idea was it to steal a motorcycle, especially since I'm guessing neither of you is of age to drive one?”

“We didn't really steal it,” Mariko replied, shuffling in her seat. “We just borrowed it for a while.”

The corners of Lin's mouth tightened. “And I gather returning it after it had been soaked in a fountain was part of the deal all along?”

“That was not my fault! Kira told me she could drive it!” Mariko said, pointing a judgmental finger towards the other girl.

Kira, who had been pretty much lounging and staring at the ceiling for the entirety of the exchange, glanced at her accomplice and grinned. “I told you I could drive it, I never said I could do it well,” she said, shrugging.

“Enough!” Lin's fist connected to the table, making both girls jump several inches into the air. “I've had it with your antics! You -” She pointed two fingers at Kira, “are up to your neck in trouble and you -”

She never had time to finish her threat to Mariko, because the door burst open again. An older, big-framed – horizontally, not so much vertically – man stood in the doorway, dressed in one of those expensive fancy suits which still paled next to the red color of his face.

“I guess when I set up those doors, I was just wasting my time,” Lin muttered under her breath. But she did realize now why the girl looked so familiar. The man was Ueta Ido, the manager of the biggest bank in the city. So the girl must be -

“Why is my daughter in handcuffs?” the man bellowed, gripping the girl's shoulder. “I demand she be released immediately!”

“Your daughter is in handcuffs because of vehicle theft,” Lin replied coolly. “She will be released after due process.”

“Theft! My daughter is not a thief!” Mr. Ido said. “This is clearly a misunderstanding. Come on, Mariko, let's go.”

Mariko looked at her father over shoulder. “Well, daddy, actually...”

“Actually what? You don't need to steal, I can buy you ten motorcycles when you're of age. Or twenty!”

“It's not...” The girl cringed and seemed to shrink a few sizes. Seeing the deepening color on the man's face, Lin was just about to cut into the exchange when another voice spoke.

“She's right,” Kira stated brightly. “I mean, what she's trying to say is... I did it. It was my idea, I dragged her into it. None of it is her fault. Chief, you can arrest me but let Mariko go. She didn't do anything.”

The girl seemed very sincere – that was, the perfect image of sincerity, with big eyes, slanted eyebrows, pouting lower lip and all. Lin had met her way more often than she would have liked, and the girl had never looked like that, not once.

“You!” Mr. Ido seemed to only now register the other girl's presence in the room. He let go of Mariko and advanced towards Kira, his heavy steps shaking the floor. “I should have known this is your fault! It's always you!” With surprising agility, he grasped the collar of the girl's shirt. “How many times have I told you to stay away from my daughter?!”

There was a whiz and a snap, and the man's thick wrist became tied with metallic wire. Lin was standing now, staring at him very sternly beneath her eyebrows.

“Let go of her,” she ordered.

Mr. Ido turned his angry gaze at her. “She's been corrupting my daughter for months! You should lock her up, she's like... like an eelsnake!”

Lin's fingers dug into the table and the wire tightened. “I don't care whom she's been 'corrupting', you are not assaulting a minor in my office,” she spoke, her voice more of a growl now. “Let. Go.”

The man's grip loosened, though it might be because of the loss of feeling in his hand. Kira dropped back in her chair and smoothed out her shirt like nothing had happened, even though there was a small tremble in her hands. Mr. Ido rubbed his hand and took a deep breath, forcing the color on his face to fade a little.

“Very well,” he said. “But my demand – _wish_ still stands. She confessed, my daughter is innocent. I presume she has no reason to stay here imprisoned any longer?”

Lin turned her attention to Mariko, who had thus far seemed content to stay out of sight and out of mind. “Is it true what Kira says? That you had no part in this?”

The girl opened her mouth and looked at her friend from the corner of her eye. Kira smiled and nodded. They tried to be stealthy about the exchange, but unlike Mr. Ido, Lin had no trouble spotting it.

“Yes,” Mariko said quietly, hanging her head. “It's true.”

Lin huffed as she crossed her arms. The handcuffs on the girl's wrists undid themselves and floated onto the table. “Alright. Since you're _innocent_ , you can go.”

Mr. Ido looked far too satisfied for Lin's liking, but at this point she was just happy to get rid of him before she would have to press charges. Mariko whispered goodbyes to Kira, at which point the man quickly shoved his daughter out of the doorway before him and slammed them shut afterwards. Kira made rude gestures at the closing doors. The silence that set in the office was remarkable compared to the situation half a minute ago.

Lin leaned against her desk, examining the girl who had curled more or less into a ball formation, blowing hair strands out of her face like she was bored with all the time in the world.

“Tell me, is she really worth getting locked up again?” the Chief asked.

Kira glanced at her, golden eyes shining under the black veil of hair. “Yes.”

Lin sighed. “Alright. Lead the way. You know where to go.”

 

***

 

The prison system of the Republic City was divided into two sections: short-term and long-term. The first, located in the police headquarters, was mainly for overnight guests, drunks passed out on the streets and the like, and people who were in hold for a period of investigation. The latter was for actual, convicted criminals. Technically, since her newest offense had granted her a lot more than two weeks, Kira should have been tossed into the long-term section instead of her usual cell. She had asked Chief Beifong about it when the woman had locked her up. The Chief had merely paid her an unamused glance and told her – directly quoted – that Fire Nation would freeze over twice before she would throw a fifteen-year-old in the same cell block with thugs and murderers.

Frankly, with her little display at the office, Kira had been more than surprised. The woman must have had nerves made of titanium. It was pretty admirable.

She laid on the metal slab next to the wall that was supposed to function as a bed, lolling her head over edge and counting the tiles in the wall. There were 127 of them. She had been in the same cell so often it could have as well had her name on it. She did hear the approaching steps in the corridor, but didn't pay any more attention to them. It was about time they brought her dinner.

“Kira?”

Kira's eyes widened and she sat up so fast that her neck snapped, sending little jolts down her spine. “ _Mari_?”

Mariko's blue eyes shone softly in the dim lighting as she rose on her tiptoes, searching for the other girl in the cell. Kira scrambled to the door, her hands closing over the carefully manicured fingers around the bars.

“Mari,” she breathed, a ridiculous grin rising on her lips. “Do you have a plan?”

Mariko frowned in confusion. “For what?”

“For busting me out. I have a couple of my own, I've had a lot of time to come up with them”, Kira explained. “But seriously, how did you even get in here? Did you finally learn to pick locks?”

Mariko uttered a small laugh and shook her head. “Didn't need to. I can be pretty persuasive when I want to.” Her pretty face became serious again. “I'm sorry you had to go to jail for me. I'm sorry I let you.”

Kira twisted her arm until she managed to slip it between the bars and under Mariko's chin, lifting it until the other girl would look at her again. “Hey, it's okay. I'm used to it.”

“Still. I'm sorry,” Mariko said. Then her expression brightened a little. “But, I convinced dad to pay for the bike to the guy we took it from, so at least you don't have to worry about that.”

“Great,” Kira smirked. “I didn't have quite that much in my savings.”

They both laughed, leaning their foreheads against the bars until their front hair got tangled, straight black strands and chocolate-brown curls.

“Anyway, it's not like they're keeping me here forever,” Kira continued. “I'll send you a message once I get out, okay?”

Mariko fell out of her tiptoes and bit her lip. “Yeah, that's why I came. I... I needed to tell you,” she said. “Kira... I can't see you anymore.”

Kira shrugged. “I know that. I didn't expect you to be able to visit me at all.”

“No, I don't mean while you're here. I mean – ever.”

Kira's breathing ceased for a short moment, during which Mariko unwound her fingers from hers and took a step back. She hung her head, letting her hair fall over her face.

“Kira, daddy's right,” Mariko said quietly. “This... thing we have – it's not right. We have to sneak behind my parents' backs and we get in trouble all the time – and I'm not blaming you for that, I know like half of those ideas were mine – but... I want to get married someday and have kids and grandkids and that can't happen if I'm with you.”

Kira swallowed, her lower lip trembling. “Are you – are you breaking up with me?”

Mariko looked away and wrung her hands. “It's not really breaking up, I mean – we're not even together together, we're both girls. It's not real.”

“Yes it is! My feelings for you are totally real and I'll beat up anyone who says otherwise!” Kira argued. “Why do you think I went to jail for you?”

The brunette took another step back, her lower lip trembling as she wiped her eyes with her cloak. “Kira, I'm really sorry,” she whispered. “Goodbye.”

Mariko turned around and ran off, quickly disappearing from sight. Kira pulled at the bars as if she could bend them with sheer physical strength and willpower.

“Mari – Mari wait!” she shouted, the muscles of her arms spasming. “Wait!” Her palms numb from the grip, she slowly stopped pulling. “Wait.” Her fingers disentangled themselves from the steel, her nails scratching invisible marks into the doorway. Tears were already streaming down her face before her head connected with the steel bars.

“I love you,” she whispered.

By some minimal thread of sense, Kira waited for the sound of a closing door at the end of the corridor before slamming her firsts into the steel door. It was several inches thick and wouldn't budge under flesh and bones, but she kept punching it until and after the skin on her knuckles broke and left small flakes on the door. She stopped only when the escalating sensation of pain faded into broken, senseless numbness. Slowly, her feet turned her around and she fell down, burying her face in her knees as her sobs ripped themselves out of her chest, echoing in the cold stones of the cell block.

 

***

 

The metal on Lin's feet clattered as she marched along the corridor of the holding cells. The prisoners had just been given breakfast, so the space was filled with sounds of munching and slurping. But when she stopped behind cell number seven, it was both dark and utterly quiet. If she hadn't known any better, she might have thought the girl had escaped during the night.

Lin opened the door. The light of the corridor revealed a dark lump on the bed and an untouched food tray that she nearly walked on when she stepped inside. If the lump hadn't had a small ascending and descending movement to it, it would have looked like it was dead. Kira might have pulled all kinds of tricks before, but a hunger strike certainly wasn't part of her repertoire.

“Get up,” Lin ordered. The lump proved itself deaf. Annoyed, Lin waved her hand, and the lid on the window slid aside, letting sunlight flood the room. Kira whined, curling herself even tighter. “I said, get up. I am not asking the third time.”

The lump shifted. “Am I getting out yet?” it mumbled.

“After only a week? No, you're not,” Lin replied dryly.

“Then shut the door and leave me here to die.”

Lin raised her eyebrows as she leaned against the wall. If the girl's ability to frustrate her had left any room for other feelings, she might have begun to grow worried. She reached towards the bed and slowly detached half of it from the wall, raising the side with a head on it until the girl was more or less forced into a sitting position.

Kira looked, to be frank, like a dog that had been kicked into a gutter. Several times. Her hair was a partially oily, partially dry mess that clung to her back like an animal in itself. Her skin was devoid of color, save for the purple rings around her eyes where every vein shone bright red.

“What is the matter with you?” Lin asked impatiently.

“Nothing,” Kira muttered, her voice raw and dry, and raised both her hands to rub or shelter her eyes from the light. Her knuckles were covered with dried blood and pieces of broken off skin.

Lin huffed. She had asked – if the girl didn't want to respond, it was her own problem. Still, Kira's hands looked bad enough that she couldn't fight the tiny bout of concern that pushed her frown deeper.

“We need to have a talk,” she said.

“Okay,” Kira replied. No snide remark, no arrogant gestures. That level of cooperation was disconcerting.

“You're turning sixteen soon,” Lin continued. While the exact date was anybody's guess since the girl always gave a different one, it was inevitably approaching.

“Yeah. So?”

Lin dropped the bunch of papers from her hands next to the girl on the bed. It was quite a thick stack, and the resulting sound echoed in the cell. Kira didn't even look at it.

“That's the list of your offenses. It's the length of a fire ferret if you wrote it all down on one paper,” Lin said. “And that doesn't contain all the things we've linked you in, but lack evidence for. Now, I know you're all too well aware of that you can't be put under trial as a minor.” The girl made a small, impassive shrug. “But the moment you turn sixteen – you cross the line once, even with the tip of your toes, and you're going down not only for that but all of this.”

Lin waved her hand over the stack of papers now scattered over the bed. Kira finally showed some life signs as her posture straightened and she looked up at the Chief.

“Wait - what?” the girl asked. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

Kira stumbled on her feet and would have fallen straight on her face if Lin hadn't caught her. The girl tore herself away and spun around, seemingly staying standing by sheer willpower rather than any actual energy.

“But – I don't – why doesn't anybody tell me these things?” she yelled.

“I'm sure somebody has. You just didn't listen,” Lin replied dryly.

“Oh gods,” Kira winced. She dropped down on the chair in the corner and buried her face in her hands, wincing again as her hair brushed against the broken skin. “What am I gonna do? I'm not gonna get out till I'm thirty...”

_You could just, I don't know, not break the law again_ , Lin thought laconically, but didn't say it out loud. She knew it was about as far-off possibility as the North Pole melting.

“That's what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said as she walked closer to the nearly hyperventilating girl. “There is a way for minors to clean their records before turning of age of criminal responsibility. Though I'm pretty sure you're not up to it in the... condition you're in.”

Kira lowered her hands and grumbled, “Who said I'm not?”

Lin suppressed a satisfied smile as the girl played straight into her hands. There was the spunk that she had grown used to, instead of this wailing ghost-like creature. It would make this a lot easier.

“I said it,” Lin said. “Look at you. You lay here comatose in the dark and refuse to eat. Face it, you're not up to it.”

“Blast your opinion!” Kira exclaimed as she shot up from her chair, crossing the distance between them. She rose on her tiptoes in a futile attempt to reduce the height difference and nearly snarled at the Chief's face. “I don't care what it is, say what I have to do and I'll do it! We'll see who's up to what.”

This time Lin didn't hold off her smirk. She crossed her arms and looked down at the girl. “I'll let you out of this cell now. You will report to me tomorrow, eight o'clock, sharp.” She turned her back to the fuming girl and added, as an afterthought: “There's a doctor on the third floor. Go show those hands to her. You can't do anything if you lose your fingers.”

 

***

 

It was seven fifty-five in the morning when Lin felt a presence outside the doors of her office. She put down her pen and bent the doors open, revealing the person who stood in the doorway.

“Morning, Chief!” Kira beamed, waving her bandaged hand. She still looked tired, though a bit less so than the day before, but at least she was clean.

Lin blinked. “Oh. You're here,” she said flatly. It was a bit surprising that the girl had shown up; she would have bet that Kira would come back her senses or her rebellious spirit and rather shake the dust of the city off her feet than work for the police. The girl apparently followed the Chief's line of thoughts, as she lifted up her chin and narrowed her red-rimmed eyes. It seemed that Lin had managed to tap into a vein of long forgotten, deep-buried Fire Nation pride inside the girl.

“Yeah, I'm here,” Kira replied. Then she rubbed her hands together and her face broke into an excited grin. “So, what am I gonna be doing? Tracking escaped prisoners? Catching Triad thugs? Oh, oh, do I get to drive one of them awesome police motorcycles?”

Lin smiled shortly. “Not exactly.”

 

***

 

“Stupid Chief Beifong,” Kira mumbled. “Stupid police force. Stupid age of criminal responsibility. Why the heck did I sign up for this?”

She was slowly advancing along a corridor on the first floor of the police headquarters, dragging a bucket full of water with her. It was pretty murky at this point, and she wasn't even halfway through. Chief Beifong had directed her to a cleaning lady, who in turn had put a mop and the bucket in her hands and told her to start from the first floor. To scrub the floors, wipe off the dust, empty the trashcans of every corridor and room that wasn't locked. And not to snoop around or, under any circumstances, touch anything.

“I should burn this whole place down,” Kira muttered as she sunk the mop into the bucket, lifted it back up and wrung it until it wasn't splashing water everywhere. The muscles of her arms were starting to ache, probably from the combination of monotonous movement and lack of rest and nutrition, and a blister threatened to pop on the skin between her thumb and her forefinger. She was _this_ close to abandoning the mop and sneaking out, but something kept her put. Namely the fact that she didn't want to give Chief Beifong the satisfaction of getting to say “I told you so”.

Kira arrived at another open doorway and peeked in. It was a dim, medium-sized room that had a lot of cabinets and shelves filled with miscellaneous equipment, some kind of a storage space. There was also a police officer there, a young man who had his eyes glued to a document of some sort. Kira knocked on the doorframe.

“Hey, um – I'm supposed to clean up here,” she said. “So, can I come in or...?”

“It's okay,” the young man said and looked at her over his shoulder. He seemed really young, he was probably a total rookie in the force, but he had a familiar face. Kira guessed she'd been arrested by him once or twice. His name was something like... Yon? Or Yuan? “Knock yourself out. I was just leaving anyway.”

“Thanks,” Kira said, her voice dripping sarcasm as she dragged her equipment in. She dropped the bucket down next to the doorway, wet the mop and begun to scrub.

Officer Yuan – she decided it fit him better – put the papers in his hands back to their file. He was on his way to an open cabinet when he stopped and stared at her. “Hey, have I seen you before?”

“Possibly,” Kira said with a noncommittal shrug.

Yuan snapped his fingers. “I _have_ seen you before,” he said brightly. “You're here to off your offenses, aren't you?”

Kira sighed; there was no point in denying it now. “Yes,” she admitted and couldn't help glowering at the man. He had the nerve to laugh at her.

“It's cool,” Yuan said. “Or, well, the cleaning never gets cool. But I've been in the same place.”

Kira's mopping halted and she frowned. “But... you're a police officer. How can you have a record?”

“I don't have one anymore. That's the whole point. I did some stupid stuff when I was younger, but the Chief offered me a chance to clean up my act,” Yuan explained. He rummaged around the cabinet for a bit, pushed the file in its place and pulled out another one.

Kira looked at the murky water dubiously. “So this is like... what, Chief Beifong's unofficial recruiting channel?”

Yuan chuckled. “Usually not, so you're probably safe. Just stay on her good side and you should get by just fine.”

“She has a good side?” Kira wondered. She had a really hard time imagining the existence of such a thing. “Anyway, I think I'm as far from her good side as it's physically possible.”

Yuan laughed. “Well, she's gotta have some reason to let you scrub yourself a clean slate,” he reasoned.

Kira shrugged, not wanting to think about that woman anymore. Chief Beifong was on her way to becoming her least favorite person, especially since the blister on her hand just popped and she bit her lip to suppress the wince over the added pain. She mopped her way through the room, not paying much attention to the young man shuffling behind her. A minute or two passed in silence until she reached the shelf at the back of the room and was about to turn around when her eyes hit something.

“What is that?” Kira muttered to no-one in particular. She let her mop leaning against the wall as she carefully picked up the object of her curiosity. It was a simple steel bracer, except that it had raised compartment, some kind of a device in the middle. A three-way grapnel hook was sticking out of the narrower end. There was a little rust on the corners of the bracer, but the device itself was well-oiled.

“Don't they tell you guys not to touch anything?” Yuan's voice suddenly asked behind her.

Kira jumped and quickly laid the bracer back on the shelf. “Sorry, I was just... dusting it off?” Yuan chuckled, his brown eyes dancing with amusement. Kira rolled her eyes. “Okay, bad lie,” she admitted. “But what is that thing?”

“It's a cable launcher,” Yuan said as he picked the bracer up and turned it around in his hands. “All the police used to have bracers like these. Of course, the non-benders couldn't bend the metal wires, but they're still useful with a little aiming skills. But then the mechanism was moved to the back of our uniforms, so non-benders stopped using these and the metalbenders didn't really need 'em anymore.”

“Awesome,” Kira remarked. “How does it work?”

“You put it on your arm – well, it's pretty small so it doesn't fit over mine, but anyway – and if you're not a metalbender, you push this button over here.” Yuan's explanation stopped pretty abruptly as he cast her a suspicious look. “Why are you so interested?”

“No reason,” Kira lied with wide eyes. Yuan laughed.

“Sure,” he chuckled. “Anyway, I really have to go now. Seriously though, don't touch it. It hasn't been used for years, I don't even know if it works anymore.”

Kira nodded earnestly when Yuan turned to leave. She waited for his footsteps to fade away and listened for anyone else approaching, but heard nothing. Snatching the bracer again, she pulled it on her right arm, ignoring the pain when it rubbed against her healing knuckles. It fit like it was made for her. Falling into a steady, wide-legged stance, she pointed her hand towards the notice board made of corks on the wall and pushed the button.

Nothing happened and Kira sighed out of frustration. Of course it wouldn't work, Yuan had just said so. More annoyed than actually trying to fix it, she hit the button repeatedly until -

“Whoa,” Kira breathed, and then, “Crap.”

The bracer was in working order, after all. The bad news was that it had shot the metal wire towards one of the cabinets, and the grapnel hook had dug itself into the wooden door with no problem. Kira pulled her arm back, but the wire didn't give in an inch. Hitting the button again wouldn't work, either.

“Crappity crap,” Kira hissed. She walked over to the cabinet, and while the wire would neatly wind itself back into the launcher, the hook itself wouldn't budge. She took a good hold of the wire, as near to the grapnel as she could, and pulled. The cabinet itself swayed a little, but the hook stayed put.

“Oh come on, this should not be this hard!” Kira muttered. She lifted one of her legs and pressed her foot next to the problem spot, hopping further on her other foot to get a more steady position, and pulled hard.

The grapnel hook... still wouldn't budge. The cabinet, however, rose off its back feet and started to fall right towards her.

“Oh sh-”

There was a very loud rumble when a heavy wooden cabinet and all the files inside it did a ninety-degree relocation. Three police officers, one of whom was Yuan, ran to the room to find out what had caused such ungodly noise. Two of them lifted the cabinet back on its feet and Kira slowly rose to her elbows, rubbing the back of her head.

“I'm okay!” she announced and looked at the bracer on her arm. “Hey, I got the hook out!”

 

***

 

Kira's knees were hurting. While she had been longing to get her hands on the police motorcycles for the entire time, this was not the way she had wanted it to happen. She had been blessed with the task of washing and polishing all the vehicles stored in the police garages, starting from the bikes and advancing to the bigger stuff. (Of course, they didn't let her anywhere near the bikes without first checking twice that none of them had keys in them. She had seen best not to mention that she could start most bikes and automobiles from the cords.) She was hoping it was some kind of twisted humor from Chief Beifong's part, because there was no way she would manage to wash those zeppelins.

Cursing under her breath, Kira forced herself up, walked the couple feet over to the next bike and sunk back on her knees, wiping sweat off her forehead. The sun was shining straight through the windows of the garage, gluing her top on her back, and the splashing water took care of the rest. She was pretty sure there wasn't a spot on her that wasn't either wet, sweaty or dirty.

“How's it going, Pepper?”

Kira wiped hair out of her face and looked at the young man in the doorway of the garage. She held back the urge to stick out her tongue at him.

“Seriously, can you stop with the nickname?” she snapped. “And it was Blue Volcano habanero, by the way.”

Yuan shrugged. “Pepper's pepper.”

“Maybe to you, you don't seem able to tell. I never would have thought you policemen are so squeamish.”

After the incident with the bracer and the cabinet, Kira has been briefly assigned to help in the canteen. Emphasis on the word 'briefly', because one of the cooks had told her to season a casserole and, well. The casserole had been a huge hit among the officers that had Fire Nation ancestry; among the others, not so much.

Yuan chuckled and ran a hand through his hair as he walked closer. “But really, how are you doing?”

“Seventeen bikes done, fifteen to go. In this garage, anyway,” Kira sighed. “Could be worse. I spent the last week scrubbing bathrooms. I guess I got promoted because for once, I didn't break anything.”

“Explains why I haven't seen you lately.”

“Why, because you don't go to the bathroom?”

Yuan's ears reddened and Kira felt a mad dash of satisfaction. She threw the sponge back into the bucket, wrung it dryer and returned to scratching off bird poop from the otherwise shiny black surface.

“So did you have something to do here or were you just gonna stand there and watch me suffer?” she asked when a minute or so had passed in silence.

“Oh. I was... going on a patrol,” Yuan replied quickly. “Except that I just realized it's tomorrow, so... I guess I'm gonna go now. See you 'round, Pepper.”

Kira muttered something similar, resisting the urge to throw the wet, dirty rag on Yuan's neck when he left, but the bird poop needed it slightly more. Idly she scratched the back of her neck; she was pretty sure she was allergic to something in the detergent, because small, itchy bumps had begun to randomly appear on certain parts of her skin. Her fingers hit the lock of the silver chain and before she could catch it, the whole thing had dropped straight into the water bucket.

“Oh no,” Kira gasped and delved her hand after it, searching around the grey water until her fingers found the metallic object. Quickly she lifted it out of the water, worry etched on her face as she examined it. It was a golden locket with a small clasp to its side, ornate and probably very expensive. Normally she wore it closely hidden under her shirt, but since she had shed her outer shirt in the heat, it had been dangling free.

Carefully Kira pried the locket open, praying that the picture inside wouldn't be ruined. It wasn't. The locket had been tight enough to shelter the inside from the water. However, that didn't help much in sheltering it from a saltier variety of water leaking from her eyes.

It was a photography of her and Mariko, their cheeks pressed together so they would fit in the frame. They had ran off to a photographer's parlor one day, the kind that didn't ask questions as long as it got paid. They were both smiling, Mariko even wider than the girl next to her. She looked happy. They looked happy.

Kira closed her fist around the locket so tight her palm was hurting. She bit her lip, rocking back and forth as she tried to contain the wail that threatened to tear itself out of her chest. She hit her closed fist to the nearest available surface, which happened to be the side of the bike. There was a small sound of scratching metal, but it wasn't the sound that worried her.

No, that was the sound of three hundred pounds of steel slowly tipping over.

Kira watched in a strange state of horrified mesmerization as the motorcycle she had been washing fell over, hitting the side of the next bike in the row. And so on, like gigantic domino pieces in slow motion. By the third or fourth bike, her brain had caught up on the fact that she should maybe do something. She sprang to her feet and raced the falling bikes, slipping between the one just tipping over and the one next to it.

Kira managed to hold the bike from falling, even though it meant she was trapped in an awkward position, sandwiched between two heavy vehicles. There was no possibility for her to get out; that would have required lifting all the seven bikes in the row simultaneously.

“Oh come on, how can this even happen?” Kira winced, hoping desperately that someone, preferably a metalbender, would come to the garage soon and save her. Not Chief Beifong, though. She'd rather die there than let the woman witness this mess.

 

***

 

The next morning Kira was late. After being sent home early yesterday because of her... accident, she had spent rest of day wandering about the city, arguing with herself. Eventually her steps had led her into a pawnshop, whose owner had first accused her being a thief (she had never even been there before) and then tried to cheat her out of her money.

Mariko's locket would feed her for a month, or two. Kira wasn't certain, she had never owned that much money at the same time in her life. She had stashed it rigorously on the first dark hours of the night and spent the remaining hours tossing and turning in her makeshift bed, feeling both very proud and incredibly sad. It was like a tiny animal was gnawing at her heart, leaving behind an empty spot that couldn't ever possibly be filled again.

So Kira had slept in and now she was late, galloping along the streets in speed that made the air at the bottom of her lungs burn. She took a couple of shortcuts and ran about third of the time on rooftops, but the journey still felt like it took forever. Only about a mile or so from the police headquarters she ran into a dense crowd and scoffed in annoyance as she pushed herself through it, until she found herself in the first row.

The crowd ended in a police line, a couple of officers standing on the other side, keeping people in line. There were a lot more officers and at least four police automobiles gathered around the three-story block of flats. Kira noticed that all its windows were dark and had no people visible.

Kira jumped up a couple of times, searching for a familiar figure until she found it. Making sure the coast was clear, she slipped from under the police line and scurried towards the Chief who stood behind one of the police vans.

“Hey, Chief!” she panted, still a little out of breath, as she appeared at the woman's side. “Sorry I'm late, I overslept, I – what's with all this fuss?”

Chief Beifong stared at her, only now having noticed her presence, and her brows lowered into a deep frown. “Kira! What are you doing here?”

“I was going to the station, but I got blocked by the crowd,” Kira explained, shrugging. “What's going on?”

“Nothing that concerns you,” the woman replied, her frown deepening as she started walking towards another car. Kira followed her like a shirshu.

“But – I can do something!” she argued. “Isn't that what -”

Suddenly a fireball shot out of the window on the second store. Of course, Kira had no time to see where it had come from; she hardly had time to turn her back and shelter her face by reflex, bracing for the contact.

It never happened. The pavement before them rose up from the ground, taking and withstanding the heat of the flame until it died out. Kira blinked, looking from the pavement to the woman beside her holding up her right hand, an expression of accustomed concentration on her face.

“Whoa,” Kira breathed, a grin spreading on her lips. “Thanks.”

Chief Beifong glowered at her and gripped her arm tightly, dragging her from the fire line to safety behind one of the vans and all but threw her against the car's side.

“There are six criminals and twenty hostages in that building!” the woman yelled. “I have no time for your antics and no time to save your hide! Stay right here and don't move a muscle, or I will throw you into a cell for the next thirty years!”

Kira swallowed and shrunk down a couple of inches; she had seen Chief Beifong mad before, but never _this_ mad. The woman's eyes were flaring like green flames and she suddenly looked several feet taller. Kira nodded earnestly and, after the Chief left her there, sunk down on the ground, her legs trembling. She inhaled deeply, calming her breath, not paying much attention when Yuan appeared from behind the corner and sat down beside her.

“Afternoon, Pepper,” the young man grinned. “Did you get detention?”

“I never get to do anything exciting,” Kira huffed, although she was still a little shaken up from getting yelled at. “Shouldn't you be there playing hero or something?”

“Not yet. We can't just storm in there, we must guarantee the safety of the hostages.”

“Sounds annoying,” Kira remarked.

“It is,” Yuan replied. “We've already been here for three hours. You gotta admire the Chief's resolve.”

Kira peeked around the corner of the van. Chief Beifong was the only officer standing out in the open, talking into a megaphone while dodging or warding off fire and ice and flying rocks at the same time. If the woman had been at it for hours, no wonder she wanted to kill her. It occurred to Kira that this was the first time she had seen Lin Beifong handling a truly dangerous part of her job. She had forgotten about that part, having been under the woman's scorn mostly for shoplifting and other mishaps. She wondered what kind of character it must take, to do that kind of job every day, to endanger oneself willingly for the wellbeing of other people.

“Yeah,” Kira muttered. “You do.”

She fell back against the van, suddenly feeling ten times worse about rushing in like an idiot and requiring Chief Beifong to save her. Which the woman had done, without a second thought. Yuan cleared his throat beside her and ran his hand through his hair – again – as if he was terribly concerned about his appearance while they were in the middle of a hostage crisis.

“Listen, I was thinking – I know this is a bad place, but...” Yuan started. “I hope I'm not coming off as a creep, tell me if I am and I'll drop this immediately, but – your birthday's coming up soon, isn't it? That's why you're doing this now?”

“Yeah,” Kira replied, wondering what was supposed to be creepy about asking her about her birthday. Of course, she'd lie if Yuan asked the exact day, but he didn't know that.

Yuan smiled, a small dimple appearing on his left cheek. “Because I was thinking – hoping that you'd let me take you out on your birthday. Whenever it is.”

_Oh._ “Err....” Kira blinked several times, unconsciously shifting a couple of inches farther from him. At a moment's notice, all those times when the young officer had just hung around and teased her got a clear explanation. In hindsight she guessed that she should have maybe realized something before, but – it's wasn't like the possibility ever occurred to her. Yuan had been nice to her, for a policeman, and she figured he fell into the category of a 'cute' guy. It was just that...

“Everyone, into formation! We're going in!” Chief Beifong's voice suddenly yelled. Yuan shifted from 'cute guy' form to 'metalbender squad member' mode in an instance, pulling his helmet over his head and hopping onto his feet, running out to the street. Kira let out a long, relieved sigh.

There was a rumble of footsteps running to two directions, out of the house and into it. Kira peeked around the corner again, taking in the scene of hostages scrambling towards the safety of the few remaining police officers outside. She stood on her feet and stretched her limbs, figuring that the imminent danger was over, but staying right where the Chief had left her to make sure she wouldn't get into trouble again. She was bent in two by her waist, looking at the world upside-down when she spotted it.

A man had just jumped out of the window, landing into the small alley next to the building. He had bright red hair and his right arm was covered in gang tattoos. Gazing around, the man took off, running away from the scene.

“Hey, I think -” Kira started, but then realized no-one was there. She circled around the van to the nearest police officer, pushing her way through the ex-hostages gathered around him. “Listen, there's a -”

“Not now, kid, I have work to do!” the man grumbled. He was one of the policemen who were not so nice to near-outlaws like her, thinking that their presence at the station somehow tainted its good name.

“Well blast you too,” Kira mumbled, slinking back towards free space. She rose on her tiptoes, searching for the tuft of red hair still visible at the alley. She bit her lip, her nails digging into her palms as the fear towards Chief Beifong and the will to freaking _do something_ fought inside her.

Finally, the fear lost.

 

***

 

The redheaded man was quick on his feet. Even though he left behind a thin trail of blood, probably from cutting himself with the window glass, it didn't seem to slow him down. It didn't help him, though, that the direction he had taken off into was practically a puzzle of randomly scattered houses, later added wings and lots of pointless dead-ends.

Fortunately, Kira was quicker. She was gaining in on the guy, who had in all probability noticed her at this point, although she was hoping he hadn't got a very close look.

There was maybe twenty feet of distance between them when the man turned around another corner. Kira grinned, because it was clear he did not know where he was going, whereas she had quite a good map in her head. Living on the streets had its perks, apparently. She took a couple more running steps and leaped, hanging on to a balcony and climbing up its railing.

An old woman was drinking tea inside the apartment the balcony belonged to and blinked at her owlishly.

“Sorry. Police business,” Kira breathed before she jumped up, got a grip at the edge of the rooftop and pulled herself up. She sprinted to the other side and dropped down, staying in the crouched position as she landed. She heard the frantic beating of feet approaching, sneaked behind a trashcan and wrapped up her right sleeve, revealing the steel bracer under it. She lifted her arm at the approximate height of knees, pointed it at the opposite wall and pressed the button.

Two seconds later the man arrived, tripped into the wire and threw a beautiful double somersault before smashing on his face into the road. Kira detached the hook from the wall – it was a particular flick of a wrist that did it, it had turned out – and stepped before the culprit, pointing the grapnel hook towards his head.

“Don't you dare move,” she threatened in her best Chief Beifong voice. Which, admittedly, wasn't that stellar.

The man raised his head a bit, narrowing his eyes as he tried to focus his vision. “You're not a cop,” he muttered.

“Very astute of you,” Kira commented. Then the recognition hit her. “Wait – I know you! You and your friends locked me up in that jewelry store to take all the blame for it! You bastards!”

“Oh, it's you,” the man said, a grin spreading over his face. His started to push himself up, slowly.

“I said don't move!” Kira yelled, stepping closer and targeting his forehead.

“What are you gonna do with that? You're not a bender,” the man said. “And you know I am. So why don't you put the toy down, because I really don't want to hurt you.”

Kira huffed, anger pressing her brows down. “Funny, seeing that you were ready to hurt twenty people like two minutes ago.”

“Alright, I lied. Maybe I do want to hurt you.”

Flames lit around both his hands. Kira had expected it, so she was able to dodge, backing of several feet before the man got himself up properly. For a fleeting moment, fear gripped her, the heat of the flame against her face and the flicker of memories in a deep, secret compartment of her brain. But she shook it off, masking her grimace into a smirk.

“Get over here and I will roast you!” the man shouted, gathering another bout of fire around his fist.

“Well, you can _try_ ,” Kira mocked and picked up the lid of the nearest trashcan.

Taking a deep breath, she took a step towards the man. He shot at her again but she evaded it, taking a few steps on the wall before landing on the ground. She held off the next blast with the lid, feeling it getting hot in her hand so she threw it. A wave of fire flew in the air at the same time as the metal lid ricocheted from the wall. Kira dropped down in time by a hair; literally, since she could smell the end of her ponytail blazing off. The man was less observant and howled when the lid hit him straight to the side of his head.

“Too slow!” Kira exclaimed, jumping back on her feet. She dodged all the next blasts by running a full circle around the man, who, to be frank, wasn't relying so much on aim than just pure rage. “Come on, you can do better than that.”

The alley became filled with roaring fire and nearly maniacal laughter. Mrs. Nitin next door took her cane and went to close the balcony door. With all these rude people, a citizen couldn't enjoy their tea in peace.

 

***

 

After three and a half tiring hours, the hostage crisis was finally over. There was a distinct smell of smoke in the air and the top story of the building had crumbled, but there were no casualties, so Lin considered the operation a success. Her men were walking the criminals out, lining them up for the headcount. There was the boss, who was a powerful firebender, three earthbenders, one waterbender and...

“Wait,” Lin realized, speaking to no-one in particular. “Where is the sixth? The other firebender?”

“Right here!”

Lin turned to look towards a small alley where two figures were emerging, one standing up and dragging the other behind. The redheaded man was struggling to get out of the metal wire spun around his body, from ankles to his wrists, effectively tying him up and preventing him from bending. Kira was holding on to the wire around his feet, pulling him a few feet, stopping to wipe of perspiration from her forehead and pulling again.

“Okay, I'm done, this guy is blazing heavy,” the girl announced as she dropped the culprit unceremoniously onto the paving. “Does anyone have water around here?”

Her hands turning into fists, Lin marched towards the girl. “Don't tell me you ran off after him by yourself,” she said, her voice coming from somewhere low in her chest.

“And packed him up good, too. Glad to be of service,” Kira replied, bowing down by her waist, an infuriatingly self-satisfied smirk on her face. Lin gritted her teeth.

“After I told you to stay put?”

The girl shrugged. “I did, during the whole hostage situation. But then I saw this guy run away, and nobody noticed nor listened to me, so I thought -”

“You thought what?!” Lin exclaimed, stepping forth and gripping the girl by the shoulders, shaking her a little. “That it was a good idea to chase a wanted criminal by yourself? You could have got yourself killed!”

Now Kira had the nerve to frown. “What's the big deal? I did just fine.”

“He's a firebender!”

“Please,” Kira scoffed. “You think I've never fought benders before? I can handle myself.”

Lin fought the desire the throw the girl into the van with the criminals. Her eyes hit the metallic glimmer under Kira's right sleeve. The girl noticed that she noticed and tried to hide her arm behind her back, but Lin was faster and took hold of it, bringing it to her view.

“I am not even going to ask how you got your hands on this again,” she said very quietly, her ire far too great for any amount of yelling to contain it.

At least the girl had the backbone to look ashamed. “I thought it could come in handy. I – I was going to return it.”

Lin let go of Kira before she would break bones. She straightened her back, taking a deep breaths as she stared down at the stubborn, impudent, insufferable evil spirit masquerading itself as a teenage girl. She had several beginnings to a good scolding in her mind, but she doubted none of them would do any good; there were instances were words were insufficient. A couple of big rocks would suffice, but that was, unfortunately, illegal.

“I'm disappointed in you,” Lin said quietly as she crossed her arms. For a moment, something glimmered in Kira's eyes before she hung her head, refusing to look her in the eye.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I just wanted to help.”

Saying nothing, Lin turned around and took in on the scene. Seeing as the place looked quite cleaned up and the sixth criminal had been hauled off with the rest (she hadn't even noticed when that happened), she started walking towards her car.

“Get in,” Lin ordered. “I'm taking you to the headquarters.”

 

***

 

The drive back to the police headquarters was horrible. Factually it wasn't a long trip, but to Kira it felt like it took a small, painful eternity. She sat at the edge of her seat, wishing she was an earthbender so that she could make the ground swallow her. There was a heavy weight in the pit of her stomach that made her want to puke, despite knowing it wouldn't help at all.

Chief Beifong didn't look at her or talk to her. Kira wished she had; she would have taken any amount of scolding over this cutting silence. Heck, she would have rather had the Chief drive up to a secluded alley and beat her; she could see from the woman's whitened knuckles on the wheel that she wanted to. There was still a tiny, stubborn part inside Kira that thought she had done a good thing, catching an escaped criminal and bringing him to justice. It was like an ember left of an old roaring fire, slowly sizzling inside her, but she didn't bother to try and blow into it to make it flare again. She simply didn't have the strength anymore.

They arrived at the garage and the Chief parked the car, starting to walk towards the doorway without saying a word. Lacking instructions, Kira followed her, trying to make as little noise as possible. They were climbing up the staircase between the basement and the ground level when Kira suddenly stopped, clutching her chest. She couldn't hold it anymore, she had to puke up. Verbally, that was.

“Chief Beifong?” she said, her voice coming out weak and wavering. “Can I ask you something?”

The woman still wouldn't look at her, but at least she halted a few steps higher. “What is it?”

Kira moved her lips, trying to form her thoughts into coherent syllables. “Why are you doing this?” she finally asked, forcing the question out of her mouth. “Letting me cleanse my record, I mean. I know I've done absolutely nothing to deserve it. All I've done is messed up and annoyed you.”

Chief Beifong was quiet for such a long time Kira was certain she wouldn't answer her at all. Why would she? She didn't have to, and she certainly had no reason to want to indulge her. For all she knew, the woman was on her way to throwing her back into a cell.

“Because,” Chief Beifong suddenly started, her voice echoing on the stone walls, “despite everything you have done, I believe there is a difference between you and the thugs we arrested today. And I would rather keep it that way.”

The woman turned enough to look at her over her shoulder, and Kira realized her eyes weren't burning with anger anymore. They looked... sad, almost. No, that wasn't the right word.

Empathy was.

Kira felt her eyes stinging irresistibly and her lower lip beginning to tremble. Chief Beifong was polite enough to continue on her way, leaving Kira in the staircase trying to stifle her sobs with her palm.

 

***

 

The next day dawned with rain, heavy drops of water beating the windows, rumbling softly on the ungiving roof of the police station. For once, Lin heard the footsteps behind her door before she sensed them, because each of them made a wet slapping sound against the marble. Her fingers on the typewriter halted and she waved her hand, swinging the doors open.

Kira entered her office without a word, slipping onto a chair. Her wet hair hung in front of her face like a curtain, hiding her eyes completely, and the downcast head didn't help. She sat there, immovable, silent, like a statue of someone long since dead.

Lin tensed. While she had tried, hard, to drill some sense into the girl, now she feared she had gone too far. It had been an unexpected sting in her heart to witness Kira cry; to see into something so deep, so vulnerable without even particularly trying to. Of course, she hadn't exactly seen it, but felt it in the tremor of the stone. The effect was the same. Lin didn't quite understand what she had uttered so harshly, but she was afraid she had gone too deep and broken something irreparably and irreversibly.

She cleared her throat and continued writing. “I told the front desk to send you here,” she said.

“I know, they told me,” Kira replied without raising her eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” Lin said. If there was a reaction to it, it was hidden behind wet hair and soaking clothing. “You're done. Your record is clean.”

“Oh,” Kira said. “Okay.”

Lin didn't figure out whether it was “oh, this soon” or “oh, this late” or something entirely else. She moved the document in the typewriter lower, coming to yet another column to which she could only guess. While Lin was frowning, it escaped her notice when a smile crept slowly, sneakily on the girl's lips.

“You know, it's my birthday,” Kira suddenly said.

“What?” Lin asked, distracted.

“Today is my birthday. Like, my actual birthday, not one of those I've just made up,” Kira explained. She wiped the hair away from her face; the gold of her eyes was shining in the rays of light peeking from between the rain clouds.

Lin didn't say anything, just typed the current date sixteen years back on the 'Date of Birth' column. She filled out a few more spots, but it was quick work because now they were empty. When she was done, she carefully took the paper out of the typewriter and handed it to the girl over the desk.

“Happy birthday, then,” Lin said, the corners of her mouth turning into a smile. “Take it as your present. Don't waste it.”

“I won't,” Kira replied. She stood up as she took her record, now as clean as pure platinum, and bowed deeply. There was no mocking in that gesture. “Thank you. I owe you one. I'll pay it back, someday.”

Lin shook her head. “Please don't. I've had quite enough of you for a lifetime.”

Kira laughed, with all the mirth and mischief Lin had ever seen her able to muster. “No promises. I don't want to start my adult life lying to the Chief of Police.”

Then the girl left Lin's office, sandals slapping on the stone floor. And as much as Lin wanted her far and gone from increasing her workload and the grey percentage of her hair, she was left with a lingering feeling the police station would somehow be a little more peaceful and thus, more empty, without Kira.

Outside, the sky cleared.

 


	4. Smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long, long hiatus. Real life hit'n'ran me and all. But be assured, I have not abandoned this story. Thank you for all the kudos and comments, they motivate me to continue.

**CHAPTER THREE: Smoke**

 

_3 years ago_

Darkness had fallen like a blanket over the Republic City, the clouds concealing the stars eliminating the little natural light. The police squad had to rely on various unnatural light sources, store signs and street lights namely, which were severely lacking around these blocks. It was a poor district, mainly used for either storage space or factories that produced smells foul enough to prevent building them on a better part of the city. The only people that lived there were the ones unable to afford avoiding the smog.

Not that the lack of light particularly bothered the squad, especially Lin. Carefully advancing along an alley, she imagined hearing something and raised her hand, bringing the rest of the squad to a halt, to stop the clattering of metal from their armor. She retracted the sole of her shoe and kicked the ground, searching the source of the sound with her seismic sense.

She was right. There was someone. Someone who was running fairly quickly, as if sensing the trap awaiting a couple blocks away.

Silently, Lin signaled half the squad to continue around the next corner and took the rest with her, turning back where they had come from. Their target was definitely aware of them now, because its speed just increased and Lin had some trouble spotting it, like it had spent half the time off the ground. They were only a small warehouse apart from it now, and she heard shouting from the distance but couldn't tell what was being said.

Lin pointed to the alley beside the warehouse. The men nodded and ran off towards the noise, leaving her to her own devices. Lin kept going until she arrived at the other end of the warehouse, the shouting growing in volume the closer she got to it, and she began to make out the words.

"Somebody grab her!"

"Huang, around the back...!"

"I told you, stop it and just  _listen_!"

The first two voices belonged to her men, but the third one was new. It was a female voice, and sounded more irritated than panicked to be surrounded by several police officers.

Behind the warehouse there was a small square, littered by stacks of big wooden boxes and mostly incomplete construction site stands. The officers were all chasing a lone figure in dark clothing who kept, unbelievably, avoiding all of them simultaneously. The figure dropped, rolled, spun around and threw backflips with the same ease other people breathed with, treating the obstacles in her way like second ground; it was like a dance to which none of Lin's men knew the steps. It was an uncanny act and almost mesmerizing, if it hadn't been for the fact that they were supposed to have caught the shady character a few minutes ago.

Lin readied her cables, but didn't step out of the conventional shadow she was in. There was something wrong about this scene and it took her a moment to realize what it was. The figure wasn't attacking her officers, with or without bending, just dodging them. Surely it would have helped the escape to take down a few, but the figure seemed unwilling to hurt them. Lin watched as the culprit swung herself on top of the unstable construction platform which began to creak immediately. Three officers shot their cables at the figure at the same time the platform crumbled down, but the figure dug something from her pocket and threw it down. Sparkles and smoke filled the air, making it impossible to see what was happening, into or out of the smoke.

Lin emerged from the shadows, raising her arms. Waited. Listened. When a few fleeting seconds later a blurred figure flew out of the smoke field, soaring through the air like a human hawk, Lin shot.

Cables hit the figure and spun around her, cutting her flight as effectively as a stone wall. The bagged culprit hit the ground with a satisfying thud, crying out in pain. Lin walked up to the previously elusive figure as her men began to find their way out of the smoke and took hold of the hood over the figure's head, lifting her up to her knees.

"Alright," Lin said coldly as she pulled the hood off. "Let's see who -"

There was a lot of blinking in that moment.

Lin's was astounded, mostly. While the face under the hood was a little different, enough of the features were similar for her to recognize it. On that face was a pair of distinctive golden eyes, blinking as they tried to focus their vision in the semi-darkness, and apparently succeeded in it since the face broke into a grin.

"Chief Beifong," the young, strange-but-not woman said. "This certainly brings up memories."

Lin sighed out a name that she hadn't had to voice for years. "Kira."

 

***

 

They had chosen an old, abandoned storage building as their temporary base for the duration of the raids. It was quite small and still smelled of burnt rubber and gasoline, but at least it was mostly empty and had a good view around the surroundings. Two more officers were stationed inside, guarding and scoping while the rest of them roamed the streets.

Lin hauled Kira to the base personally, pulling her by the hood, at a brisk pace and perhaps unnecessary harshness that didn't leave much room for protests by her prisoner. Her mind was dark with unvoiced anger as she all but threw the girl into the room that she had just named the interrogation chamber, following in with three officers. There was a wooden box in the middle of the floor and Kira managed to maneuver herself into more or less sitting position on it. She gazed up at the chief, panting for air.

"Can you just – loosen these up a little bit?" Kira asked, squirming in the cables.

Lin huffed. "So you can try to escape?"

"There's like eight of you here, where am I gonna run?" Kira asked. "Please, I can't really breathe..."

Considering the display at the square, that wasn't such an infallible argument, but the last thing Lin wanted was to compliment the girl. So she unwound most of the cables, leaving only a short bit as handcuffs around the wrists just in case. Kira stood up, carefully enough not to alarm her, to flex her limbs and Lin allowed both of them a moment to catch their breaths, partially to prevent herself from acting on the ire and disappointment stewing inside her.

Still, even seething with anger, Lin couldn't help but noticed how much the girl had changed. Well, Kira was hardly a girl any longer; at some point during the three years when the Chief hadn't seen so much as a flash of her, the girl had disappeared. What stood before her now was a young woman only a couple inches or so shorter than her, still lithe and slender in built but more like an acrobat and less like an underfed rodent. There was grace in every movement that certainly had been missing before, like a foal that had grown into an adult horse and gained control of all its limbs.

Kira had certainly grown up. Too bad that it had been into an entirely wrong direction, on the inside.

And apparently Lin wasn't the only one who noticed. She caught officer Yuan with the corner of her eye; the man was just about visibly drooling, slowly scanning the subtle curves of Kira's new adult form.

"Yuan," Lin barked. "Guard duty. Outside."

The man jumped, the tips of his ears flushed scarlet and he turned on his heels, nearly running out of the room. Kira's eyes flashed with amusement as she sat back down.

"You're very calm, considering your predicament," Lin remarked. If her feelings about it crept into her voice, she didn't care. "You're not fifteen anymore. You're going down for this for good. I really hoped you would do better than joining the Agni Kai Triad."

"Wait," Kira said, frowning. Then, out of the blue, she burst laughing, waves of hair falling over her face. That was... an unexpected reaction, and did nothing to ease the ticking of the vein on Lin's temple. "That's what this is about? You think I'm in the Triad?"

"You were sneaking near their drug storage. You escaped the police." Lin glanced at the young woman's gloved hand. "You're wearing a bracelet with the Triad's emblem on it. You were never a good liar but that isn't even trying."

"But I'm not in the Triad! Well, I sort of am, but not really. I'm undercover." Kira said that with bright eyes, without fidgeting. Lin frowned.

"For whom?"

"For you. You just... don't know that yet."

The following silence was the personification of sardonic. Even Kira had the sense to realize how incredibly absurd her words had sounded. Lin crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow.

"Care to elaborate?" she asked dryly.

The young woman swallowed, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes for a moment. "Look," she started, wiping hair from her face. "Some guys from the Triad had been pressuring me to join the gang forever. So finally I pretended to give in, both to get them off my back and gather intel from the inside. I've been at it for... six or seven months now."

Lin frowned. "And you've never come forth... why, exactly?"

"Because for the longest time they wouldn't tell me anything. It's incredibly hard to get ahead in that organization if you're not a bender." Kira sighed. "I didn't want to risk blowing my cover if I didn't have anything major to uncover. But I do now! They have a big shipment coming next week and most of the Triad's gonna be there. And they'll be needing every available pair of hands to handle it, so they have no choice but to let me know where it is. You can bust two thirds of the Triad in one coup!"

Lin tilted her head, still frowning. While the story sounded good – too good to be true – she had one big obstacle why she couldn't just believe Kira.

"Why would you do it?" Lin asked. "Why would you risk your life like that?"

"Because I owe you and I wanted to pay it back," Kira replied quietly. "I told you I would."

"That's the worst excuse ever!" exclaimed one of the officers, unable to contain his opinion anymore. "Chief, you can't possibly believe what this lying -"

Lin raised her hand, silencing the man. She stared deep into the golden eyes before her, boring through their unfaltering surface, trying to find a crack. Her mother had taught her how to tell if someone was lying; the tell was in their heartbeat, their breathing patterns. Being a police officer had taught her even further, catching the subtle cues of shifting eyes and fumbling fingers.

"I do," Lin found herself saying, to her own astonishment. "I do believe her."

A smile rose on Kira's lips, the first one Lin had witnessed that wasn't sarcastic or mischievous, just happy.

"But -" the man started again.

"Out! Both of you!" Lin ordered. She felt she couldn't deal with any more input at the moment.

Lin listened as two sets of footsteps left the room and the door creaked when it was closed, leaving her alone with the young woman. Kira still sat there, rather patiently, waiting for her to come up with some kind of a reaction. Lin walked over to the small, partially broken window and gazed out into the dark streets, rubbing the bridge of her nose. Weariness threatened to overtake her, the weight of all nightly patrols and raids suddenly weighing on her shoulders.

"I don't know what I should do with you anymore," Lin sighed. "From all the insane, foolish ruses you have pulled..."

"Do I get a vote?" Kira asked, a grin audible in her voice. She stood up from the box and padded closer, leaning against the wall while staying carefully away from the line of sight, should someone see inside the room from the outside. "I know I should probably have told you earlier. And this is certainly not how I wanted you to find out -"

"You shouldn't have done this in the first place!" Lin snapped. "You can't just decide to go undercover by yourself! These things should be done by the book. You have endangered our entire operation -"

"How have I even affected the operation since nobody knows I'm -"

"- not to mention your own skin!" Lin continued. "I would never plant a civilian as a mole! Do you have any idea what those people will do to you if they find out?"

"That's why I haven't told anybody. Besides, as a non-bender, I'm not exactly what they consider a threat." Kira paused to smirk. "Suckers."

Lin huffed. "And say – just imagine, for a moment, that we go through with your half-assed plan. What will happen to you after that? Surely they're going to realize something is up when we bust their shipment."

"They can't do much if they're in jail," the young woman reasoned. "And the rest... well, they don't have to know it was me."

Lin raised an eyebrow. "You've really thought this true, haven't you?"

Kira shrugged, a small smile playing on her lips. "I'm usually don't do plans, but I tried this time." She checked the shadows and rooftops outside before she rested her head against the window frame, the light of the unveiled moon painting her eyes almost silver. "Look, I get that you're mad at me and I won't blame you if you want to arrest me. But this is a really good opportunity and I think, if I know you at all, that you don't want to waste it either."

Lin's brow furrowed, because as much as she hated to admit it, the girl was right.  _The woman_ , she corrected in her mind; she had a hard time letting go of the image of the moody, skinny thing that had once been. And while she would have preferred Kira not getting into trouble at all, it was better she got into trouble that was beneficial to society.

"Why are you so adamant about this raid?" Lin asked. "Besides thinking you owe me?"

"Honestly?" Kira said, the smirk on her face eerily familiar from years ago. "Because Spark likes to practice her aim by chucking fireballs at me, and I can't wait to see her face when you rush in and bust her ribs."

 

***

 

Over a week passed without any kind of message after Lin had let Kira go, watching the young woman jump out of the window and disappear into the night, vanishing like a ghost before morning light. Her men still looked for hidden bases and storages belonging to the Triad, mostly to keep up the image of normal routine, although in reality they had a reserve of officers in all shifts in case the call came. Kira had said she would most likely be told only a few hours in advance, so the police would have very little time to gather their units and move out.

Doubt lingered inside Lin's mind every day that went by in silence. She feared that despite all her skill in lie detection, Kira had somehow managed to fool her; that either there was no shipment or her officers would be walking into a trap. It was a possibility, however distant, that her desire to believe that Kira wasn't like... that Kira was  _good_ , had clouded her judgement. But perhaps even more than that, Lin feared that there would come a morning when they would find Kira's corpse washed ashore, the word 'traitor' carved on its skin.

Lin told none of it to her officers. She waited in her office till late at night, staring at the phone on her desk, willing it to ring. She was so concentrated on the stubbornly mute object that she didn't notice the tapping against the window until it grew impatient, starting to knack against the frame. Startled, Lin's head turned towards the window and the reddish-brown bird of prey balancing on its sill. She opened the window and the bird flew in, landing gracefully on her desk and peering at her with piercing yellow eyes.

A messenger hawk. There was a numerous amount of them in the city, most of them as pets since the need for messaging had decreased in correlation with the increasing number of phones in households. But this one had a canister tied to its back, one it tried to shake off as if its feathers were tickling underneath. Lin cracked open the canister and rolled open the message inside while absently scratching the hawk's back.

She had never been more relieved because of a few hastily scribbled lines.

 

***

 

Kira wasn't too fond of being underground. Of course she had a vast field of experience in being underground in the meaning of all kinds of shady dealings, but the literary position of being below ground level gave her chills. The Triad's super-secret exchange point of cash and illegal substances, it turned out, was almost at the edge of the city and definitely under the city. It was a gigantic hall burrowed several dozen feet underground by what must have been days' work for the earthbenders hired from another Triad. A tunnel connected the burrow to the outside world and was guarded by a few of the same benders, who lifted up the concealing earth mass, let the automobiles in and then dropped the whole thing back, trees and all.

A small buzz of lightning shot where her feet had been half a second before Kira stepped backwards, sensing the hairs of her arms rising. It was such an automatic response she didn't even think about it anymore.

"Aren't you jumpy," remarked the woman slogging towards her, little sparkles of electricity still buzzing between her fingers. She had a short, stocky frame, coppery skin and dark blue eyes, all of which screamed Water Tribe even though her Fire Nation side had won when it came to bending. "Waiting for something to fall on you?"

"Actually, yes," Kira replied without sarcasm, eyeing the tree root sticking through the ceiling of the made-up hall. "Couldn't we get our shipments to the harbor or something, like normal criminals?"

Spark chuckled. There was always something very menacing about the raspy laughter dripping from her lips. "No, because the cops watch the harbor. But don't worry, pet, our badgers did a good job," she assured. "Now stop daydreaming and move your ass, the shipment's coming any minute."

Kira gritted her teeth, uncurling her hands that had turned into fists without conscious effort. "Yeah, because clearly I'm the one slacking off here," she muttered, looking around the burrow at the various groups of thugs who were all very concentrated on wisecracking and smoking.

A hand gripped her face by her chin. Apparently Kira hadn't been muttering quietly enough, because Spark had grabbed her as she walked by and turned her head forcefully. Kira frowned, with no choice but to look at the crime lieutenant.

"Didn't I tell you something about mouthing off to me?" the woman asked, her fingers digging into Kira's cheeks.

Kira took a deep breath. "Yes."

"What was it?"

Another deep breath. "Don't do it," Kira replied, dropping her gaze down. "I'm sorry."

Spark studied her for a while, determining whether she'd accept the obviously grudgingly given answer or not. Finally, after an outstretched moment when the woman's fingers begun to heat on Kira's skin, she let go and patted her cheek.

"Good girl," Spark praised, a lopsided grin on her lips. "Now go earn your meal before I change my mind."

Kira scurried off, idly rubbing the shivers off from her shoulders. The only thing she hated more about Spark than her constants threats was their ability to actually intimidate her. She couldn't wait for Chief Beifong and the rest of the police squad to bust in and tear the place down.

If they did, that was. She hadn't seen a sign of them – although that was the whole point and very definition of ambush – and was beginning to doubt if the Chief had actually got her note.

The trucks arrived, rolling down the soft floor of the tunnel. Kira rolled up her sleeves as she watched in the corner of her eye when Spark approached one of the drivers. Several Triad members followed their lieutenant with suitcases undoubtedly full of cold, hard cash. Then Spark gestured rather harshly to the loitering groups and they begun to scuff towards the trucks, Kira among the masses. She took hold of the cardboard box that someone put in her hands and glowered at the guy that bumped into her shoulder quite intentionally.

It happened so suddenly and quietly, with such ease that nobody frankly noticed when four holes opened into the walls of the burrowed hall, one at each corner. Their attention was only caught by the clank of metal when dozens of police officers marched out, led by a woman with black armor and silver hair.

"Everybody freeze! You're all under arrest for smuggling illegal substances!" Lin Beifong's voice echoed in the hall like its earthy walls had been turned to marble. There were less police officers than there were criminals present, but that didn't seem to bother the woman; if one had opened a dictionary at the word 'authority', it would have had Chief Beifong's picture in it, in this moment. Kira fought the impulse to grin like a madman and utterly blow her cover. That woman was freaking magnificent.

Predictably, most of the Triad members didn't freeze. They put down, or downright dropped, the boxes in their hands and slowly retreated towards the center of the space. Which Kira thought was a pretty stupid move, getting surrounded like that, but she followed their initiative.

The fight broke like a tidal wave, triggered by a single guy running off towards a police officer, which inspired everyone else to do the same. Boulders and flames soared through the air, warded off by metal cables. Kira fell back on purpose, watching the mayhem, occasionally dodging an odd flying object. She was beginning to believe the police had been informed of her since practically none of them targeted her – or maybe they just didn't deem her that dangerous because she wasn't bending at them – when cold, ungiving wires suddenly closed in around her. Her shoulder stung, struck by a sharp rock as she hit the ground hard, swept off her feet.

"You bloody jerk!" Kira shouted to the police officer who had, apparently, not got the memo. She didn't even have to act particularly hard.

Out of the blue, the policeman froze as if actually stunned by her words. Or, more likely, the electricity that still buzzed around Spark's hand when the man fell down, revealing the firebender standing behind him.

"Get up, we're leaving!" Spark said as she gripped Kira's arm, pulling her halfway up and starting to drag her towards a van.

"But -" Kira tried to scramble on her feet while simultaneously yanking off the cable. She looked around the burrow; the battle was still very much raging on, not for the lack of skill on the polices' part but the sheer number of the Triad members. Her heels dug into the earth in a vain attempt to stop the other woman dragging her along like a rag doll, as her mind raced to find words that wouldn't entirely compromise her position. "We can't just leave, there's too -"

"Yeah, we can," Spark announced, took hold of Kira's neck and hurled her into the van with three other Triad thugs already in it, one in the front behind the steering wheel.

"And how the heck do you propose we manage that?" Kira yelled, watching as several police officers closed in around their presumed escape van.

Spark smirked before she turned her back towards the van and raised both her hands high into the air. Lightning gathered like an indoor storm into a big, roaring cloud before it shot upwards to the ceiling. The entire cave shook, as if hit by an earthquake, knocking almost everyone off their feet. But that wasn't the bad part. The bad part were the rocks and chunks of earth that started to fall down from the ceiling.

"Are you crazy?! This whole place is gonna cave in!" Kira shouted.

"That's the plan, pet", Spark grinned, jumped into the van and slammed the doors shut. She banged on the wall and shouted to the driver. "What are you waiting for? Drive, while you still can!"

 

***

 

Even through the soles of her shoes, Lin felt the vibrations in the earth before anything visible happened. Almost forgetting about the random firebender thug she had just thrown to the ground, she turned her head in time to see the Triad's lieutenant, a very Water Tribe looking woman who must have been Spark, stand next to a van with her arms raised towards the ceiling. The ceiling that was starting to crumble down before her very eyes. Lin's eyes widened.

"Earthbenders!" she called, a second before the first rock fell down, as she fell into horse stance and turned her palms upward. By her command, she was joined by her earthbending officers and, surprisingly, some of the Triad thugs. Although it was probably not that surprising – they seemed just as scared as everyone else, and Lin gathered being buried alive hadn't been in their plans either.

As huge chunk of mud and stone came tumbling down nearby. Lin moved her arm up, a deep frown of concentration on her forehead, as she forced its movement to a halt a couple feet before it would have crushed a non-bending police officer and two Triad members. She saw the flicker of movement in the corner of her eye as the firebender she'd been fighting lit up a flame. The man smiled smugly, but then gazed around and seemed to come to a different conclusion, as his fire died out and he stepped back rather sheepishly.

While she stopped and sent back up several more chunks of earth, Lin searched the van again just as its engine roared to life. Her mind was racing, debating whether she should keep stabilizing the cave or stop the van before its notorious passenger could escape. Then Kira's head stuck out of the van's window, her expression stricken with panic, and Lin's decision was quickly made her. She would not risk both losing the crime lieutenant and her informer, especially since there was no telling what would happen to the latter. If Kira was in the van because she had been caught, if they would hurt her...

"Saikhan!" Lin shouted, looking over her shoulder. "You're in charge, I'm going after them!"

Saikhan nodded, but then added, "By yourself?"

"I think I can handle a couple of firebending thugs", Lin muttered under her breath. The situation was mostly in control, anyway; the earthbenders had managed to patch up most of the ceiling, and they had already been winning before the collapse. Now it was just the matter of rounding up the remaining Triad members, which her officers should be able to manage without her.

The van had taken off, climbing up the uneven floor towards the exit. They apparently had snagged at least one earthbender with them, because the earth mass was rising as they approached it. That sent another, smaller quake through the cave, and Lin decided that stopping them with bending was not safe under the circumstances. She also regretted the fact that the police had had to leave their vehicles some distance away to keep their presence hidden. Fortunately, there was a motley collection of automobiles and motorcycles courtesy of the Triad. Lin took the first bike she came upon, started it with a makeshift key she metalbent, and sped after the van.

A few seconds after the earth mass had dropped back down, a small hole blew up in the middle of it, through which Lin and her motorcycle shot to the gravelly road. Clouds had gathered up above, painting the already dark night sky pitch black, and rain had started to fall. Only lightly, but every tiny water drop felt like a needle against Lin's exposed face as she picked up the speed. She could just about spot the van's lights on the road ahead, if she looked very closely.

The thugs kept to the edge of the city, away from traffic and street lights. The road under the wheels changed from gravel to asphalt and back again, a dull choir of noise in Lin's ears as she leaned down, shielding her eyes with one hand and directing the bike with another. A couple of fire balls shot through the van's back windows to her direction, but they were too far away to hit her. She, on the other hand, was steadily gaining on them, and would soon be within the distance to -

As the van turned around corner, losing several feet of its head start in the process, Lin got her chance. She reached her hand towards the van and bent – not the van, because it could damage engine and blow the whole thing up. Instead she bent the road before the van, raising a steep ramp out of it. The vehicle flew through the air gloriously and landed right at the spot where Lin had raised a pillar that knocked it over, crashing it on its side on the ground.

A tiny, self-satisfied smile on her lips, Lin braked, stopped the bike without any hurry and parked it a small distance away. She had ample time to walk closer to the van before its contents got themselves together and spilled out of the vehicle, some of them holding their heads but otherwise in one piece. She was glad to notice that despite some disorientation, Kira seemed fine. The young woman flashed her a quick, discreet smile before she was pushed aside by Spark.

The crime lieutenant seemed mostly furious. She had a nasty gash on her forehead that she didn't even appear to notice as she stepped closer. The rest of the thugs gathered in a half-circle around her, unable to quite decide whether they should be concerned about one cop versus five of them. Lin crossed her arms, the corner of her mouth turning into a cool, amused smirk. Whether they knew it or not, they should definitely be concerned.

As if on cue, the sky rumbled and the light drizzle became a crushing downpour.

"As I already stated, you are all under arrest", Lin spoke. "You better surrender now and not add resisting an officer to your charges."

Their leader laughed. It was the low, raspy laugh of someone who had smoked way too many cigarettes. Her eyes, blue as they were, seemed to crackle an inner fire.

"You're awfully confident, Chief, coming here and threatening us all by yourself", Spark remarked. "Not a least bit of concerned that my gang will burn you to the ground?"

"I wouldn't trust too much on the loyalty of your  _gang_ , especially after you almost buried most of them alive", Lin shot back.

Spark shrugged without an ounce of remorse. "You know what they say about omelets and eggs", she said. "Alright, enough standing around – waste her, so we can get moving!"

"Um, Spark?" spoke Kira, whose gaze had been shooting from Lin to Spark and back for the duration of the exchange. "I'm not so sure this is a good idea, maybe we should -"

"Shut up!" Spark turned her attention away from Lin to backhand Kira straight across her face. The young woman stumbled backwards, holding her cheek and glowering at the firebender, but didn't say another word. "If I want your opinion, I ask for it."

Lin's hands curled into fists. Kira's words from before echoed in her head –  _Spark likes to practice her aim by chucking fireballs at me_  – and made her wonder what else Spark had inflicted on the young woman. Kira seemed honestly afraid of the firebender, the same Kira that hadn't had the smarts to even be afraid of Lin since that one time when she was twelve. Without much conscious effort, Lin drew a hefty rock from the makeshift ramp.  _The thugs' chance of peaceful arrest had clearly passed._

Spark had good reflexes, that much had to be admitted – she managed to dodge the rock before it hit her, instead connecting to the van before her. After Lin had fired that first shot, the Triad thugs made their minds and lunged at her all at one. As her metal cables weren't very useful to block fireballs, Lin stepped out of their way and sent a wire towards one of the three firebenders, who didn't have such good reflexes and stumbled to the ground neatly wrapped up. The earthbender of the group dug up a square foot of pavement and ground and threw it towards the police officer. Lin caught it in midair, raised an eyebrow and flicked her fingers. The thug made an expression best described as ' _oh, shit'_  before his ammo came rushing back towards him and buried him underneath.

Again, fire came flying at her, from two directions at the same time. Lin bent the earth beneath her feet and used it as a catapult to jump high into the air; the fireballs collided with each other and the resulting explosion fizzled in the heavy rain, saturating the scene with thick mist. Lin used the couple free seconds she had to make a quick assessment of the situation. The two thugs she had beaten were still out, only the unknown firebender and Spark were left. Kira had disappeared from sight, which was probably a good thing, as Lin would rather have the young woman didn't get any more injured in the hustle.

Lin landed squarely on her feet, a small distance away from the nameless firebender. As he sprung towards her, flame flaring up around his fist, she swung her arm in an upwards motion. The man ran straight into the pillar that had risen out of the earth, his head making a loud  _thunk_  as it hit the vertically placed pavement. It almost made Lin roll her eyes; that was such an obvious move, really, how thick could these thugs be?

"Looks like its just you and me", a voice spoke behind her. Calmly, Lin turned around, facing the bronze-skinned firebender.

"Looks like it", she responded as her fingers twitched subtly, drawing out the metal cables. "Are you sure you don't want to surrender?"

Spark chuckled, as if she was winning, as if her comrades hadn't been cut down one by one like grass. Lin was beginning to understand what Kira found so intimidating about this woman, but had no time to contemplate it before a wall of fire came speeding towards her. She tore off the surface of the street and held it like a shield, pushing against the fire until the rain drowned it out.

Judging by the firebender's arrogance, Lin really had expected the rest of the battle to take longer than it did. But only after a short exchange of fire and rock, she had wrapped a cable tightly around the other woman's torso and forced her on her knees. Spark's breath was wheezing from the lack of air, but still she laughed.

"What's so funny?" Lin huffed.

"You earthbenders", Spark rasped. "So predictable."

Lin saw the blue flicker between the crime lieutenant's fingers and had a fraction of a second to consider that maybe this had been a bad idea. And then Spark wrapped her hand around the cable, and over a hundred volts of electricity shot towards Lin.

There was nothing she could do; the lightning traveled too fast along the cable, attacking her in all her wet clothing and metal armor like a ravenous beast, biting into her flesh. Lin opened her mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out, her body too paralyzed to produce any. She barely registered as Spark got on her feet, never detaching her hand from the cable. The firebender could hold her right there, in that small spot of voltage that kept her own hand at the let-go threshold, glued to the cable. The world flashed before her eyes, at one moment she could see every rain drop in slow motion before the next when she saw nothing but a white light.

Someone shouted – that was the last thing Lin registered before all the light faded away, and she fell down.

 

***

 

" _Stop it!"_

The small swishing of metal through the air didn't even carry over the loud crackle of lightning. Therefore the firebender didn't notice until a sharp pain bit into her arm and broke her concentration. As the lightning died out, such deadly, loaded silence descended that one hardly noticed the steady beating of rain or the thump when Chief Beifong's limp body fell to the ground.

Slowly, Spark's gaze lowered to the throwing knife sticking out of her flesh. An incredulous smile spread on her lips as she uttered a short, raspy laugh.

"Let it go," Kira said. "Let it go and leave now and you won't find the next one between your eyes."

The crime lieutenant… actually laughed as she grasped the knife in her arm and pulled it out, not even twitching from pain or the stream of blood that burst out. Her blue eyes flashed as she looked up to the younger woman standing some distance away, another knife perched between her fingers.

"Really? You're going to kill me with those?" Spark asked, still looking terrifyingly amused at the turn of events.

"If you're smart, I won't have to," Kira replied, hoping that her voice wasn't really shaking as much as it did in her own ears. She kept absolutely still, hardly daring to breathe, because she feared any movement would give away the tremble in her hands.

Again Spark laughed as she tossed the knife away and pressed her hand over the wound. "You know, I can't say I'm too surprised," she said. "There's always been something fishy about you. But blowing your cover now, because of one copper… that's just dumb, pet."

Kira's mouth formed a tight line as her knuckles turned white. "I'm only gonna say this one more time. Leave. Now," she spoke between her gritted teeth. She knew it was a longshot that Spark would ever be intimidated by someone like her. But Chief Beifong was still lying on the ground, terrifyingly still, so she prayed that a miracle would happen and Spark would just leave. It was better option than -

"And if I won't? You'd really fight me, because of  _her_?"

Kira swallowed, glanced at the woman on the ground – and despite her heart racing in her chest erratically like the thunder above, the answer was clear as day to her. "Yes."

Something in Spark's eyed flashed. She shook her head as she raised her uninjured hand, flames lighting up on her palm as if by the flick of a switch. "I see you made your bed. Now lie in it."

The fire erupted to Kira's direction like a huge, roaring dragon. Knowing to expect it, she dodged with relative ease and the fire sizzled angrily as it hit the pavement instead, extinguished by the downpour. As soon as her feet hit ground again, she waved her arm in an arch and threw the throwing dagger at the firebender that had yet to move from her place. Not pausing to wait for the hit or miss, Kira chucked the rest of her knives, her hand moving in a blur.

Spark didn't dodge; she didn't bother to. Instead she raised her arm as if it was holding a shield and a high, V-shaped wall of fire appeared out of thin air. The pressure or the heat was so strong that it pushed the blades off their course, sending them twirling into the darkness.

Kira gulped. She hadn't even known someone could  _do_  that. However, she wasn't left with much time to ponder how screwed she was as another burst of flame shot at her.

"You thought you could betray the Agni Kai – and ride off into the sunset – with your copper pal!" Spark shouted, emphasizing her words with fireballs so hot they burnt blue at the center. Unlike the first one, these hit much closer to their target, so close that Kira could smell the bitter scent of burning hair and realized she had lost the end of her ponytail. "Did you forget what we do to traitors?"

Perspiration was rising on Kira's skin, not so much out of exertion as from the heat that seemed to graze closer and closer every time. The downside to being accustomed to being used as target practice was the fact that Spark had a frighteningly good guess about where Kira was about to move next. The last burst wasn't even shot her, it erupted up from the spot where she was going to land, and it was too late to redirect in midair. The explosion sent her back flying, and it was only after she had landed on her hands and feet – on pure luck, rather than skill – that she noticed her jacket had burnt into her shoulder. She cried out at the sharp pain that pulsed through her flesh as the fabric tugged her skin with the smallest movement. She was lucky, in a way, that the pouring rain was there to put out the fire.

"You really thought you could fight me and win?" Spark asked. "You are a worthless, non-bending street rat and you wasted your only chance of _ever_  becoming anything else!"

Kira gritted her teeth, swallowing down a response that would just incite Spark to further violence, when she spotted a glimmer on the ground in the corner of her eye. As she evaded the next fireball, she picked up the knife and threw it blindly. It drowned into a burst of fire, but that didn't matter; what mattered was the split-second window that it gave her as the firebender was distracted.

Kira sprang towards the other woman, yelling from the bottom of her lungs, mostly to convince herself that  _she wasn't terrified to her core_  as her fist connected with Spark's cheek. She managed to bury her knee into Spark's stomach before the crime lieutenant caught up with the change of pace and blocked her next strike. But that didn't matter, as long as she stayed within arm's reach, Spark couldn't control the game with her bending. They lashed out at each other, fueled by rage rather than any actual strategy. Kira had a slight advantage, as she was faster and much better at dodging, but that didn't help when Spark grabbed her with both hands and threw her down on the pavement. Grimacing at the pain that shot through her ankle, Kira swiped the firebender off her feet and hurried to get herself back up before -

Before Spark could jump up, kick her square in the stomach and send her tumbling backwards, air escaping from her lungs.

"Enough!" the firebender shouted, took a step forward and pointed two fingers at her.

Considering how many unpleasant people she knew, Kira had only been electrocuted a few times before, and every time she forgot how much it hurt. Boiling water coursed underneath her skin, drawing every muscle in her body so tight she was sure they would snap, one by one. Suspended on her feet, she couldn't fight back the scream that tore itself out of her like it was escaping for dear life.

When Spark stopped, after what felt like hours, the same muscles that had been tense before were now utterly limp. Kira dropped down, hardly noticing the added pain of her temple hitting the pavement. Her heart was beating what felt like a thousand times per minute and her vision was dotted by tiny white stars. Spark's footsteps sounded like they were coming from miles away, even when Kira saw her sandals stop right beside her.

"You stupid girl," Spark sneered before she swung her foot and buried her toes into Kira's gut. Kira had no energy to utter more than a strangled whine, no strength to fight back when the firebender picked her up with one hand like she was a rag doll. But in the confines of her tortured body, her mind was racketing like a panicked little bird trying to find its way out of a cage. As her feet rose off the ground, she tried to claw at the arm hoisting her up, but the thick leather covering prevented her from doing any damage.

"You're still trying to fight? Don't you get it?" Spark spat. She raised her injured arm, despite it still bleeding profusely, and fire lighted around her fist. "You lost, Kira. You don't have any more cards up your sleeves."

Kira closed her eyes, feeling the heat of the flame on her face. An endless string of prayers ran through her mind, hoping for a miracle, because the only weapon she had left was something she didn't want to use. But then she cracked her eyes open and saw the woman lying on the ground in the distance, and she whispered her apologies to any spirit possible hanging around at hearing distance. Her jaw clenched and her eyes burning with defiance, her lips parted and grasped for sounds, but her throat was too hoarse and Spark was holding on to her clothing too tightly.

"What did you say?" the firebender asked, bringing her closer to her face.

"I said," Kira whispered, "that I've still got one."

It came so easy to her, the precision of it, etched deep into her muscle memory. Her fingers and knuckles dug twice into Spark's shoulder, once above and below the collarbones, the last one in the middle of her chest. As Spark's grasp on her clothes loosened, Kira used her last bout of strength to jump up and vault herself over the other woman, landing behind her and wasting no time to distribute a similar maneuver symmetrically on her both knees.

Spark fell down as her knees gave out, her blue eyes widening in shock as she stared at her hand, the tendons on the back of it tensing in useless effort.

"You... you know chi-blocking?" the firebender asked, incredulous. "But you've never…"

Kira smiled joylessly. "Hanging out with people like you, one needs a few aces up the sleeve."

Spark's face twisted in anger as she raised her still functioning, albeit bleeding arm. The fire on her palm died out as soon as it was born when Kira spun around and kicked her on the side of the head. With an unceremonious thump, the firebender hit the ground and stayed there.

Kira was breathing heavily, trembling from head to toe – from pain, exhaustion, remnants of fear and the terrifying surge of power from such little movements. Noticing her still pointed fingers, she shook her hand in nigh disgust. Overwhelmed by everything that had just happened, it took a few seconds for her to remember why she had done it in the first place. Gasping, she turned around and searched for Chief Beifong. The woman was still unconscious. Pale. Immobile.

_Lin._

Ignoring her own beat-up state and the sting in her ankle, Kira sprinted over to woman. She hastily shed the jacket clinging onto her skin, dropped on her knees and carefully shook the armored shoulder.

"Chief Beifong?" There was no answer; the Chief's eyelids didn't even twitch. Kira swallowed down the ice cold clump that began to gather in her throat as she pressed her palm against the woman's chest and couldn't find a heartbeat through the armor.

"Lin?" she called, her voice cracking. "Please..."

Kira leaned closer to Chief's pale face, her fingers digging under the collar. She had never felt such relief in her life as when her fingertips found a pulse and she felt the woman's breath, shallow and slow as it was, against her face. It was the final straw that collapsed her. She buried her head against the older woman's neck, breathing in the scent of jasmine and steel, water that had nothing to do with the rain running down her cheeks for the cheer joy that they were both  _alive_.

Kira didn't know how long she sat there, in the empty street, cradling the Chief of Police of the Republic City in her arms. It could have been half a minute, or five hours. But she was roused from her bubble by the sound of loud, off-key roaring of engines that had recently began to appear in her nightmares. She lifted up her head and narrowed her eyes, spotting a few set of yellow lights in the distance.

"Oh crap", she muttered. She shook Chief Beifong gently, but didn't manage to produce more than an incoherent groan out of the woman. Gritting her teeth, Kira banished the exhaustion and the pain that was suddenly  _everywhere_  from her body, and prepared to do the only thing she could think of.

 

***

 

Consciousness crept back into Lin's head slowly, reluctantly as if it was wading through thick mud. Along with it came the smell of… not wet earth and burning flesh, like she had expected. No, the air around her was warm and dry and smelled of some kind of sweet, spicy incense of all things. Suppressing a frown, Lin lied still and kept her eyes closed, pretending to any possible observers that she was still knocked out. She concentrated on her surroundings, but could sense no rocks or mud, and very little metal scattered here and there. The surface she lied on was quite hard, but smooth. Alarmingly, she noticed she was lacking her armor and boots, but at least she still had the rest of her clothes on, so the situation could have been worse.

There was a sound somewhere to her right. Reflexively, even though the movement awoke a dull ache in her limb, Lin flicked her wrist and summoned the closest metallic object towards the source.

"Whoa," said whoever the object was pointing at. "Okay, Lin, calm down. It's over – we're fine – there's no danger, just calm down, okay?"

Lin's hand stilled after the recognition hit her. She opened her eyes, blinking rapidly; the room wasn't that bright, but it took a while for the shapeless blobs in her field of vision to gain a recognizable form. When they did, she saw Kira sitting cross-legged in a chair, staring wide-eyed at the letter opener hovering a few inches from her eyeball.

"What –" Lin began. Her voice caught in her raw, dry throat and she tasted a hint of iron in her mouth. She tried to raise her head, but was immediately shot down by a jolt of pain in her back. "What happened? Where are we? ...Am I dead?"

"Oh come on, my apartment's not that messy," Kira chuckled and leaned backwards, away from the knife. "Um, do you think you could -?"

Lin let her hand drop down and the letter opener followed, hitting the floor with a quiet clank. While her arm was hurting, her fingertips felt strangely numb. Flexing her fingers, she looked at the young woman with a frown. Kira looked annoyingly comfortable just lounging there while Lin's still fuzzy head was swirling with questions. "Why am I in your apartment?"

"Well." Kira sipped something, tea judging by the scent, from the mug in her hands. "After I got Spark off your back, you still wouldn't wake up, and more cars were coming. I didn't want to risk driving through the entire city to the Police Station in case some Triad thugs caught us on the way, so I brought you to a closer safe place."

While Lin processed the information, Kira got up from her seat and padded somewhere beyond her head, out of sight. Lin tried to see where she went, but another jolt of pain in her neck as she tried to move it kept her point of view quite limited, so she gazed around at what she could see from the floor level. Wooden floor, wooden ceiling and a wooden shelf stacked with miscellaneous items, candles in various shapes and sizes scattered everywhere. The room looked like a bonfire waiting to happen instead of a safe place.

"Wait," Lin said as the thought occurred to her. "How did you get Spark off my back?"

Not far away, Kira uttered a short laugh. "Unlike you persistently seem to believe, I'm not entirely helpless," she replied.

Lin frowned and bit back an instinctive scathing remark, because the fact that she was still alive made arguing virtually impossible. She rubbed her forehead and felt a strange gooey sensation on her fingertips. Raising her hand painstakingly, she examined the sticky substance in the candlelight; it looked vaguely greenish and translucent with some darker smidgens, like seaweed, here and there.

"Kira?" she called, her voice laced with alarm and exponentially increasing ire. "What's on my face?"

"Oh, that? It's a balm that heals burns. Really good stuff, I buy it in bulk from a Water Tribe healer," Kira replied amidst the sound of clinking dishes. "Your skin looked pretty bad, so I applied it wherever I could reach without you wanting to kill me after you woke up."

Lin huffed. Kira's footsteps returned, and the young woman knelt down on the floor beside her, holding another steaming mug in her hands, though this had a different scent to it, more bitter. It was only then that Lin noticed the bandage around her ankle, several small gashes on her skin and the same gooey liquid covering the angry red spot on her shoulder.

"It's nothing," Kira said and shook her head, following her gaze. "Lucky for you, healing burns is something I've gotten really good at. Here, drink this. It'll speed up you recovery."

Lin eyed the mug suspiciously, but eventually decided that if it were part of some plot to murder her, it was a little too elaborate. She managed to drag herself into a slightly more vertical position despite the ache in her limbs and gulped down the hot, bitter drink, with some assistance from the other woman because her hands kept shaking. Lin hated it, being in such a weak state, but at least Kira was smart enough to keep any witty remarks to herself.

"Thank you," Lin muttered as she finished the drink. Digging her fingers into the futon, she started to push herself more upright through the pain and the fatigue, but was stopped by a hand on her shoulder.

"Where do you think you're going?" Kira asked.

"Where do you  _think_  I'm going?" Lin spat. "I have to get back to the station, it's an utter chaos in there after this operation and –"

"And you're still off shape, in the middle of the night in a bad neighborhood," Kira interrupted. "With some Triad thugs probably lurking around. So, not a good idea."

"I'm not going to just lie here and –"

"Yes you are. Especially after that little potion kicks in, you'll be blacked out for a few hours."

Lin's hands turned into fists as she stared at the empty cup on the floor. "I'm going to kill you," she muttered. "You made me drink that on purpose!"

"With the purpose of getting you better, yeah. With the added benefit of keeping you off the streets half-conscious," Kira pointed out. "Look, I'm sure your officers can manage a few hours without you. You really need to lie down and rest."

A long list of curses ran through Lin's head, but as reluctant as she was to admit it, the young woman was right; she could already feel the irresistible blanket of sleep settling on her body. She let her head drop back on the pillow and sighed in frustration. She would deal with the issue of being unknowingly drugged against her will in the morning.

"I need to contact them, at least," she grumbled.

"I don't have a phone," Kira said. "But I do have a messenger hawk, will that do?"

Lin nodded. Kira got up again and searched around for a minute before returning with a paper pad and a pen. Lin scribbled down a short account of the situation, namely that she was alive and well and would return first thing in the morning.

"You didn't quite think this through," she mentioned as finished the last letter, ripped off the paper and handed it to the younger woman. The numbness in the tip of her fingers had returned, whether it was a positive turn or not.

"What do you mean?" Kira asked, puzzled.

"Well, what happens if some Triad members do find us and I'm still unconscious?"

Kira smiled and shook her head as she rolled the paper into a small bundle. "Go to sleep, Lin," she said and, with uncharacteristic gentleness, wiped off a strand of hair that had glued onto Lin's forehead. Lin might have objected to it or the sudden, unauthorized use of her first name, but she was too tired. Besides, that simple gesture felt oddly comforting. "Don't worry about it. I'll protect you, I promise."

"I feel better already," Lin muttered dryly. She drifted off to sleep with Kira's laughter, like the chime of a dozen little bells, echoing in her mind.

 

***

 

The next time Lin awoke, her surroundings were considerably brighter, the smell of incense had faded and most of the candles had either burnt out or been put out. The sounds of the city carried over to the apartment from some distance away and she could hear something bubbling, but other than that, it was quiet. Experimentally, she tried to lift herself up to her elbows again and was surprised by the lack of pain. Other than stiffness that could have been just the result of laying still for several hours, she felt... fine.

Gingerly, Lin stood up from the futon and stretched her arms as she looked around. Kira herself was absent at the moment and the doors to the balcony were open, but the front door was still closed, so she didn't worry about it yet. Kira's apartment, it seemed, consisted of one room divided by a table to a kitchen and a living space. There were cracks in the bland concrete walls and the furniture was quite scarce, which might partially explain the clothes and other things scattered pretty much everywhere. To Lin's relief, she spotted her armor laid neatly on an armchair. She considered putting it on right way, but then remembered the green goo still covering her skin.

The bathroom was easy to find, as there was only one other door. It was so small that Lin almost tripped on the toilet before she found the light switch and pulled at it. The light bulb flickered on and revealed a bathroom that was not in any better condition than the apartment, but there was a sink and a mirror and that was all she needed. After some useless effort to get hot water out of the faucet, Lin settled on scrubbing the goo off with cold water and some soap. Her skin was still slightly numb, but the feeling returned as she rubbed vigorously. Leaning closer to the mirror, she inspected her face and was amazed to find no signs that somebody had tried to fry her inside her armor not that long ago. She did find a few small lines around her eyes that she wasn't particularly fond of, but there wasn't a miracle cream to erase those.

Lin stepped out of the bathroom, tapping her wet face and neck with a clean towel she had found in the cupboard under the sink. If the time in the clock on the wall was correct, it was still very early in the morning. There was still no Kira, and Lin was starting to feel like an intruder alone in another person's home, but it did leave her with more time to look around. Everything from the drapery and tablecloth to the shabby carpet on the floor ranged from deep red and orange to bright yellow. At first, Lin had attributed the prominent coloration to the sunlight shining in, but now realized that wasn't the case. For such a small space, there were also a lot of decorations: paper lanterns, tapestries, censers, even more candles, several different kinds of knives, those little carved dragon statues that one could buy from the marketplace for fifteen or twenty yuans. In short, the whole place was like one big shrine to Fire Nation, by someone who was either a big fan... or terribly homesick.

Without no-one to see as her expression fell, Lin swallowed as she took a couple of steps forward, now feeling even more like an intruder. Her eyes hit one particular photograph in a golden frame on the shelf and, despite feeling like a little kid snooping, Lin's curiosity got the better of her and she picked it up.

The photograph was old, worn out and sepia-toned. Thin cracks went both ways across it, like it had been folded in someone's pocket for a while before being framed. It was a simple portrait of three people, taken with a garden on the background. One was a woman with narrow face and long, straight, dark hair in elaborate bun, dressed in robes. She looked... familiar, somehow, despite the fact that Lin was certain she had never seen her before. She had two children in her lap, seven or eight years old, a boy and a girl, although it was hard to tell because they looked very similar. The girl had her arm wrapped around the boy; she was either hugging him or shoving him, in either case the boy didn't look too happy about it. But two out of three were smiling radiantly, and all three of them had light, shining eyes which – Lin would have now bet – had to be golden in real life. She traced the face of the little girl with her finger over the glass, frowning deeply, until her eyes widened and her lips parted in a silent gasp.

Suddenly, a scraping noise came from above. Lin hastily put the photograph back on the shelf, half a second before a pair of feet and then the rest of the young woman descended softly on the balcony from the rooftop.

"Morning, sunshine," Kira greeted, smiling pertly as she saw Lin up and standing. "How are you feeling?"

The beginning of a long and angry rant about drugging her without her permission had began to form on Lin's tongue. But seeing the shadows under Kira's eyes and the way the young woman was holding her left side as she lowered her arm, combined with the secrets revealed to her by the apartment, was like a needle that popped the balloon of her agitation.

"I... Very well, actually," Lin said, clearing her throat. "Where were you?"

"Doing a little recon, you know, just making sure we're safe," Kira said nonchalantly as she walked around the table to the kitchen and peeked under the lid of one of the pots. "Do you want breakfast? I have coffee and bread and I reheated some chicken chili soup. Don't worry, I went really easy with the chili."

"Uh... sure," Lin replied a little hesitantly. She was still mad and had lost her footing by choosing not to express it, but now that the matter of food had been mentioned, her stomach decided to inform her of its more urgent concern by rumbling out loud. A very vivid memory of tasting Kira's cookings still haunted her, but she figured that after everything that had taken place in the past twelve hours, a bowl of soup couldn't possibly kill her. "Did your messenger hawk return yet?"

"Oh, yeah. The message is somewhere on the table," Kira replied, gesturing vaguely behind herself. "How do you want your coffee?"

Lin folded the towel over her shoulder and walked over to the table. After a bit of searching, she found a small scroll halfway buried under a tea cup. "Milk, no sugar," she muttered as she rolled open the scroll and her eyes scanned over the letter. Kira soon came over with two big coffee cups, setting one of them before her on the table before she returned to the stove.

"So, anything interesting in there?" the young woman asked as she rummaged through the cupboards that seemed to be in no lesser state of disorder than the rest of the apartment.

Lin sipped the hot coffee, considering how much of the information she should disclose to the other woman. "They seem to have everything in order. Virtually all the other Triad members present were caught. That's good, that's a significant number of less thugs on the streets," she mused. Her eyes fell to another paragraph and she paused for a moment, hesitating, before she continued. "The one they call Spark is in a coma in the hospital. Blunt force trauma to the head. They're not sure if she'll wake up at all."

She lifted her gaze, watching Kira's reaction. The young woman's hands on the spoon halted and her whole body froze for a second, before she shrugged and continued stirring the soup.

"She was going to kill you. She almost did", Kira said quietly. "I had to take her out. I wasn't going to... I didn't think... But I didn't exactly have time to stick around and see how she was doing." She took the big spoon out of the soup and wiped it on the edge of the pot; there was something very deliberate in all her movements. "Am I in trouble?"

Lin shook her head. "No, you're not."

She rolled the scroll closed and stuffed it in her pocket. A heavy silence had set in the apartment, broken only by the clinking of tableware as Kira set up breakfast on a tray. Deciding that a change of subject was in order, Lin spoke again.

"So, how long have you been living here?"

"A little over a year," Kira replied and her posture relaxed visibly. "The woman who has a teashop on the first floor owns the building. She lets me live here in exchange of me helping her out with the shop a couple days a week."

"That's nice of her," Lin remarked. "Even though this place could use a little renovation."

"It's really ramshackle, I know," Kira replied as she gathered the tray and her coffee mug in her hands. She managed to balance everything in her hands as she tiptoed around the table, towards the balcony. "But the view is pretty great."

Lin followed her out to the balcony, quickly noticing that Kira was right. The building must have been quite high, because the view panned over most of the city. The Harmony Tower stood out in the distance and the Pro-Bending Arena peeked between the taller buildings, its walls shining so brightly it almost looked like it was radiating its own light. In the background of all that the sea sparkled in all hues of red and gold of the rising sun.

"Top floor has its perks, despite the fact that every time there's a storm, I have to fear the floor will crumble down," Kira said as she set the breakfast tray on the railing of the balcony and took one of the steaming bowls of soup, leaning against the railing. Lin joined her, resting her elbows on the railing on the other side of the tray and took another sip of coffee.

"So it seems," Lin said, gazing out to the waking city. Even though it was early, the noise from car engines and vendors shouting at street corners had risen together with the sun, echoing in the stone walls like a heartbeat. But the noise was muted after climbing up to the balcony, melting into an almost pleasant buzz. After last night, that moment seemed like another world. Lin gave herself permission to enjoy that serenity, closing her eyes and letting the breeze caress her face.

Eventually, deciding she could no longer avoid it, Lin eyed the soup on the tray suspiciously, until she braced herself and picked a single piece of bread. She dipped the bread in the soup, took a deep breath and bit off a piece. It was... actually really good. Hot and spicy, but not too spicy, just enough to stimulate the palate without burning it up.

Having noticed the surprise in her expression, Kira chuckled. "What did I tell you? I've toned it down a lot over the years since it turns out nobody born outside of Fire Nation could eat my cookings."

Lin huffed, but this time she took the whole bowl and started eating with a spoon. "So," she said in between mouthfuls, "what have you been doing since turning sixteen?"

Kira raised her eyebrows, looking slightly suspicious. "Am I being interrogated? Should I call a lawyer?"

Lin's mouth tugged. "I'm not in uniform right now, am I?" she said. "It's off the record. I'm just curious to know what you've been up to, besides infiltrating Triads."

"Besides infiltrating Triads? Well," Kira started. "I've been in this fire art group for a while, called the Firebirds. We do all kinds of stunts, circus tricks, acrobatics, dancing, you name it, involving fire in one form or another. But that doesn't pay a living wage, it's more like a hobby, so I've been doing all kinds of odd jobs.  _Legal_  odd jobs," she added with emphasis. "Cleaning, waiting tables, bar tending... I even sold vegetables at the marketplace at one point, but I had to wake up dreadfully early for that. Nothing fancy, but it gets food on the table. Besides, after hanging out with those Triad thugs for half a year, I'm just relieved I didn't end up living like that."

"I'm glad of that too," Lin said, smiling. She stared at Kira's face, following all the scrapes and bruises on her skin covered with a slightly different colored goo, and took a deep breath. Expressing the kind of things she was about to say now had never been her strong point. "Kira, I... suppose I need to thank you. For what you did last night."

"It's not like I could just leave you there," Kira said, shrugging as if it was no big deal. "Besides, I know you would had done the same for me."

"Of course I would, it's my duty," Lin said. "But I didn't take you for the knight in shining armor type."

"Well, you know, armor is heavy and my ostrich horse gets stuck in doorframes, so I don't usually take him along," Kira grinned.

Lin uttered a laugh, but her brow furrowed, as she was not ready to let this go. "I still don't quite understand why you went through all the trouble with this insane, foolhardy set-up. You didn't owe me risking your life like that, not last night or all the months before."

"No, I really did," Kira said quietly. She hung her head, gazing down to the ground below as her fingertips tapped in inconsistent rhythm against the coffee cup. "The thing is... for a really long time, nobody thought I had any value. Nobody thought I was capable of being anything more than a thieving street rat. Not even me. But you did."

She raised her gaze back to Lin's, and her eyes were glimmering in the hundred shades of the morning sun.

"You have no idea how much that means to me," she whispered.

Lin opened her mouth and then closed it, not quite knowing what to say. She stared back into Kira's eyes and suddenly, the picture of the smiling, mischievous little girl in the photograph flashed inside her mind. Something stung in her chest, as if someone was threading a needle through her heart. A thousand questions filled her head: What had happened to the woman and the boy in the photograph? Why had Kira come to the Republic City? Why was she still here, seeing as she missed her homeland so much?

And what was it about this one young woman that made Lin care so much about her fate, anyway?

Lin didn't get the answer for any of her questions because a red and brown blur cut short her train of thought by flying inches away from her face. Kira's head snapped back as well, following the bird of prey as it dove inside the apartment, dangling a pigeonrat from its beak.

"Ryu, no – damn it, you are not eating that inside the house!" Kira yelled as she ran off to chase the messenger hawk. "I'm not scrubbing blood off the carpet again! Bad bird, bad!"

Lin shook her head, partially at the antics of the bird and partially to banish all those strange thoughts from her head. Getting electrocuted and then made drink who-knew-what had obviously done quite a number on her. Pushing the questions that were really none of her business to the back of her mind, Lin picked up the breakfast tray, as Kira was busy dealing with her stubborn pet bird, and carried it back inside.

"Thank you for the breakfast," she said quite formally, trying to establish some sort of protocol to the situation that had been treading to strange, unfamiliar territory. "I'll be heading back to the headquarters now."

"Oh, okay," Kira replied distractedly as she tried to pry off the dead pigeonrat from the hawk's beak. Succeeding in her task, she dropped the carcass on a plate and carried it over to the balcony, where the obviously irate bird followed. "I stashed the bike behind some trashcans down in the alley. Don't be surprised if someone's found it and sold it for parts, though."

Lin raised an eyebrow at the notion, but didn't say anything – considering the neighborhood, that wouldn't be surprising. Standing in front of the armchair with her armor on it, she spread her arms and flicked her wrists. The uniform flew across the air and landed neatly on her shoulders.

"Now I'm jealous," Kira remarked as she returned. "It takes way longer for me to get dressed in the morning."

The corner of Lin's mouth tugged. She made sure that the belt snapped shut before turning around to face the young woman who was leaning against the shelf, trying to suppress a gigantic yawn. "Will be you alright?" Lin asked, concern lining her face.

Kira shrugged and waved her hand. "The remaining Triad's too devastated to miss one pack mule, and the only one who knows I ratted them out is presently out of the game. Besides, I'm… dodgy," she grinned. "I'll be fine."

"I've noticed," Lin said dryly. She tugged at the sleeve of her uniform, making sure she was looking relatively presentable. "Now, I should probably tell you yet again that you better stay out of my sight, but…" She paused, briefly wondering what made the thought of saying permanently goodbye to this woman so hard to imagine.  _Probably because it had proven so bloody impossible._ "I've given up hope you won't end up in some mess I have to pull you out of."

Kira laughed. "Speaking of which…" She stood on her tiptoes to reach to the top of the shelf, grabbing a censer and a jingly scarf before she found what she was looking for: a brochure, in red and yellow like the rest of the apartment. "The Firebirds are having a few shows next week. I'm going to be performing gymnastic on a trapeze over a flaming net. If you're not doing anything, you might want to come see if I'll manage to not fall to my death."

Lin's brows furrowed. "You have a strange predisposition to risking your life."

Kira shrugged. "Maybe I just like living a little dangerously."

"I can see that."

"Says the Chief of Police of the Republic City."

"Point taken," Lin admitted reluctantly. She then took the brochure the young woman was holding and eyed over the times. "I might be free on Thursday."

"Great." Kira's face broke into a wide, unabashed smile. Unlike the impish grins that usually frequented her lips, this was a genuine expression of joy, blinding as the light of day to a surfacing badgermole. "I'll see you then."

Lin blinked repeatedly, before she cleared her throat and folded the brochure in her pocket. "See you," she replied. Despite herself, the young woman's smile was incredibly infectious, and Lin couldn't help but return it. Evidently, erasing Kira from her life completely was a task easier said than done. But perhaps, it was something she could live with.

 


	5. Knives

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Woohoo, we've finally reached the present day! Which is, at the beginning of this chapter, around the beginning of Book One. If you've been missing Equalists, enjoy.

**CHAPTER FOUR: Knives**

_The present_

 

The last rays of the setting sun glimpsed between the tall buildings, filtered by the mist in the humid, heavy, not-yet-raining-but-almost air. The mixed group of police officers burst out of their cars quickly after finding parking spots, eager to escape the weather before the humidity would discharge as a full-blown downpour. The building before them, with its bright lights and the music emanating all the way to the street, looked very cozy and  _dry_.

Lin led the group inside and stopped by the doorway to take a look around. The police force had been a regular customer at The Hotman since its foundation, largely because of the convenient location (city centre) and suitable food options (tasty and affordable, but not so cheap one had to watch out for suspicious scrunches while eating). Her officers dropped by for a quick lunch or later in the evening, to bond over a few drinks and relax. Lin rarely joined them for the latter, she was too busy, but lately she had made time to visit the establishment more often. The reason for that, she spotted, was currently behind the bar counter and gave her a discreet little wave before turning her attention back to her customer. Lin smiled briefly before continuing on her way towards a vacating table, her officers following on her heels.

The Hotman was, according to the official marketing, a restaurant for traditional Fire Nation cuisine. Although anyone who had ever been to the Fire Nation, which included Lin, could tell that neither of the owners had. Instead they had stuffed both floors of the place with fake swords, dragon statues and more live fire than the law would technically allow. The unofficial slogan was "hot food, hot drinks, hot staff": the waiters, all young and fit, wore loose, red pants with no shirt and the waitresses, well –

"Hi, guys!" Kira greeted as she popped up by their table, dressed in the usual combination of long skirt and a top that contained less fabric than most bikinis, and adorned with jewelry that contained less actual gold than a tooth filling. She was holding a big tray full of various drinks and greasy but delicious food. "Welcome to the Hotman, I'm your waitress for the evening, and so on. So, catch anyone interesting lately?"

"Only the Avatar", one of the men replied.

Kira whistled and started the distribute the contents of the tray around the table. "Yeah, I heard about that. Didn't she say she's staying in the city for now?"

"Unfortunately", Lin muttered.

"Hey, how come you're already here with our order?" another officer asked. "We didn't order anything yet."

"Because you always order the same thing."

The man frowned. "No we don't."

"Yeah you do", Kira grinned as she put down the last drink on her tray. "Two orders of chicken wings, two orders of skewers, one chicken and one pork, onion rings, tortilla chips, three kinds of dips, and a tower of ice cream for Shui."

"I think she's right", he said. "Clearly we come here too often."

The table laughed. Kira shook her head, huge earrings jingling with the motion, and cast her eyes down to the Chief.

"Hi, Lin", she said more quietly, under the noise around them. "How are you? You haven't been around here lately."

"It's been busy at the station", Lin replied. "And the Avatar arriving hasn't helped. I've been spending more time at work than at home."

Kira cocked an eyebrow. "You sure you're not working too hard? Because I'm prepared to sneak in, club you in the head and smuggle you out in a sack if necessary."

Lin stared at her dubiously. "That seems awfully well thought-out", she remarked. Kira smirked, but before she could reply, Shui, the policewoman with the extravagant ice cream dish, tapped her arm.

"Hey, can you do that trick you did last week? Most of these guys weren't here then."

Kira raised an eyebrow. "You'll have to be a liiittle more specific."

"The one with the fruit and the dagger and stuff?"

"Oh, that one? Okay."

Kira took a thin, straight knife from the holder and snatched the cherry on top of Shui's ice cream. Lin watched with slight curiosity as Kira jabbed the knife through the cherry and drizzled the whole thing with oil; that was, until she lit it on fire and held it over her head, tilted back towards the ceiling.

"Oh, no, she's not gonna -" Yuan started.

The knife dropped into Kira's open mouth. Most of the table gasped, Lin included, one or two even gave out a little shout. Kira held up a finger to show that she was fine –  _with a burning knife stuck in her throat_  – and then slowly,  _slowly_  pulled the knife out. The men erupted in cheers when she dropped her smiling, obviously alive and not bleeding, face back to their view.

"Hold up, it's not over", Shui said.

Lin noticed the cherry was missing when Kira began chewing. The young woman closed her eyes, frowning deep in concentration. After a few seconds filled with quiet anticipation, she spat on her hand and presented them the cherry stem tied neatly into a knot.

"Oh my spirits", Yuan gasped when the others began clapping.

"He seems very impressed", Shui grinned and slapped the younger officer in the back. Yuan flustered.

"No, that's not what I-"

Kira laughed. "He should be, I'm still the only one who dares to do that. Firebenders included."

"Well, obviously the rest of the wait staff like living", Lin commented behind her cup.

Before Kira could retort, a tall, stocky man appeared behind her and grabbed her shoulder. Lin recognized him as one of the two owners of the establishment, but even if she hadn't, the mock Fire Nation uniform would have given him away.

"What are you slacking around here for? There are two tables without any food on them!" Mr. Palo bellowed.

Lin straightened her back and put her drink down. "She wasn't 'slacking around', she was serving us", she said sharply.

Immediately Mr. Palo's demeanor changed. He smiled to the Chief, showing all his (real) gold teeth and made a little bow. "Of course, of course... I was just making sure my staff is working for their money, you know how that is, right?" He wiped his brow with a silken handkerchief and turned to leave, but now before hissing the last word to Kira: "Who's paying you, me or the police?"

"You know, with the wages here, I'm not sure", Kira muttered behind his back. She rolled her eyes and spun the empty trays in the air so that they landed neatly on top of each other. "Well, duty calls. Holler me if you need anything. And by the way, you guys need to figure out whose turn it is to pay the tab."

Lin watched the young woman go, dodging tables and customers with ease. She detested the way Mr. and Mrs. Palo treated their employees, but unfortunately, being a stingy and unpleasant personality was not a crime. Not that it would have prevented her from giving them a good talking-to, if it weren't for the fact that Kira had begged her to not do that exact thing. So she remained in her seat and tried to replace the irritation simmering within with chicken skewers.

After some time, Lin headed to the bar counter in the guise of refilling her almost empty glass. She waited impatiently behind a clearly inebriated man who insisted on buying Kira a shot. The young woman took it with a delighted smile, then disappeared to fetch a cleaning rag – and to spit the drink into an empty glass, as the custom was. Satisfied, the man finally stumbled away and Lin took his place at the corner of the counter, a convenient distance away from the closest curious ear.

"Is he bothering you?" Lin asked, glaring at the man's back.

Kira shrugged and started wiping the counter. "No more than the usual drunk idiot. As if we could drink on the job", she replied. "Anyway, I'm curious about the Avatar, did you meet her?"

"I had the misfortune of interrogating her", Lin replied.

"Oh? What's she like?"

Lin sipped the last remains of her drink and thought for a while. "Actually, she reminded me of a younger you."

"Ouch", Kira grimaced. "That bad, huh?"

"Nearly worse", Lin huffed. She then got a little closer and lowered her voice. "But enough about that. Have you heard anything lately?"

Kira stood on her tiptoes and leaned over the table pretending to wipe a really stubborn stain. "Don't look now, but the two guys and the girl by the table in the left corner upstairs? I'm pretty sure they're being recruited to the Triple Threat."

"Really?"

Kira nodded. "I know the black-haired one, he's a friend of some of my 'friends'. His name's Bu. I ran into him and the girl in a bar on the weekend, he was pretty drunk and couldn't stop bragging about the power and the huge load of yuans he'd soon have. She had to drag him off before he'd spill."

Lin leaned on her hand and took a casual glance around the restaurant, scanning for the table Kira had mentioned. "Do you know what they're gonna do for their initiation?"

"Not yet, but I can ask around."

After a moment of consideration, Lin nodded. "Alright, but be discreet. I don't want them to become suspicious of you."

Kira waved her hand dismissively as she dropped back onto her feet and grinned. "Don't worry about me. I'm friends with the Chief of Police, remember? I'm covered."

It was true; somehow, after the Agni Kai raid three years ago, they had become friends. At first their contact had been mostly professional, as Kira had continued to provide her hints about the activities of her less law-abiding acquaintances. Lin hadn't liked it, but like a lantern in the dark, Kira seemed to attract shady sort of people and insisted she could as well make use of it. And Lin had to admit, the intel was useful. But in addition to that, Lin had been to a few of shows of Kira's fire art group (they weren't half bad), and over time their secret late-night meetings had developed into a more personal relationship. Kira was... refreshing company. The younger woman had the talent to appear just as Lin was stressed and frustrated to the point of snapping, bringing along home-made cupcakes and a determination to drag Lin away from her job, even if it was just for half an hour.

"Still. I have other duties besides pulling your ass out of trouble", Lin said.

Kira huffed in mock offense. "What, you're keeping count now?" Becoming more serious, she laid her hand on Lin's armored arm and smiled reassuringly. "I appreciate the concern, but I'll be fine. Really. Trust me."

Lin stared at the hand on her arm for a moment before she pulled it away to get some money from her pocket. She laid them on the table and slid them towards the younger woman. To an observer, it would have looked just like a tip, although an unusually generous one. But guessing how little the Palos paid Kira, she deserved it.

"Fine. Just take care of yourself, alright?"

Kira grinned as she pocketed the money. "You know me. I always do, one way or the other."

***

 

It was a beautiful day in the Republic City Park. The sky was void of clouds save for a few white fluffs, the sun was shining, and a gentle breeze blew just coolly enough. It would have been perfect if it weren't for one ugly stain in the picture: the protester, standing on a table and shouting into a megaphone, right on the path that Kira was walking. Her smile disappeared instantly, but she braced herself, held the paper bags in her arms tighter and continued onward.

"Join the fight against our bending oppressors! Amon will deliver us to freedom!" the protestor shouted.

Kira frowned and stamped her way through the small crowd that had gathered around the table.  _Don't engage him_ , she told herself.  _He's an idiot, he's just spewing nonsense._  She was almost through when -

"We will purge the corrupt City Council and the police force of all the benders in them!"

Kira's feet froze. She spun around and raised her voice: "What are you even talking about?"

The protestor and the crowd turned their attention on her.

"Everyone knows what I'm talking about", the protested continued into the megaphone. "Is it a coincidence that three-fourths of the Council and the police force are benders? No it is not! The non-benders of this city have no voice!"

"So all of them should be, what, fired because they're benders?" Kira asked.

"Firing is just the first step."

"But that's – that's just messed up! You talk about your so-called oppression and yet you want to -"

"'Your' oppression?" the protester caught. "What have we here? Another bender who thinks bending is  _the coolest thing ever_  and wants to knock me off my table?"

Kira swallowed. "Yeah, I want to knock you off that table. Not because I'm a bender, but because you're an idiot!"

"It seems to me that you have no idea what you're talking about, or you wouldn't be defending them!" The protester knelt down on his table. "Tell me, have you never been demeaned or bullied or attacked by a bender?"

"Of course I have, but that's not -"

"So you see, ladies and gentlemen -!"

"But that's not because they were benders!" Kira shouted over the megaphone. She put down the bags and stomped in front of the table. "That's because they're shitty people! I've been hit with fists and chains and knives too, how do you explain that?"

"But knives can be taken away and fists can be cuffed", the protestor argued. "We should make it fair and take their bending away! Then we would be on an equal level."

Kira drew a sharp breath. Suddenly blood rushed in her ears and she felt her hands curling up into fists without conscious effort. She stared into the man's monkey face and every muscle in her body shook in an attempt to not bury her fist right in the middle of it.

"You have no idea what you're talking about", she finally hissed. Sharply, she turned on her heels, grabbed her bags and walked away.

She arrived by the creek half-running and shaking from bottled up anger. She took a few deep breaths before walking up to the man in frazzled clothes already sitting on the grass.

"Sorry I'm late, I was doing inventory at the shop and it took forever", Kira said as she sat down, trying to steady her shaking voice.

"S'alright. I didn't even know, it's not like a have a clock", Gommu said cheerfully.

"Right." Kira uttered a short laugh and laid the paper bags carefully on the ground. "So anyway, I brought you some rice and tuna and a few spices that you asked for, and some fruits and vegetables even though you didn't ask for them. I thought about bringing ice cream, but I was pretty sure it would melt before -"

"Are you feelin' alright? You look a little shaken up", Gommu interrupted.

Kira blinked several times before answering. "Yeah, I'm fine, it's just... that stupid Equalist protestor really gets on my nerves."

"Imagine how much he gets on mine, I hear his rambling all day here in my bush", the vagabond said. He took one of the bananas, peeled it and examined it very critically before biting into it. "'Benders have all the power!' Like half of my friends isn't benders and just as homeless as I am. This is really good by the way, the others are gonna love these."

"You're welcome." Kira smiled weakly as she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. She stared at the sparkling water, trying to banish the dark shadow now hanging over the otherwise perfectly beautiful day. Equalists were just a bunch of idiots talking about things they could never understand. And their posters creeped her out. She had never stopped being bothered by masked men.

 

***

 

While Korra had never been to Fire Nation - or anywhere else outside the South Pole, really - she had a vague idea what the place might look like. And the restaurant Mako had just led her into looked very much like Fire Nation, somehow even too much. Even through the crowd she spotted at least ten dragon heads (statues and carvings, not real ones) and so many lanterns it was a wonder nothing and nobody was on fire. Now she understood why the place was called The Hotman.

"Mako, what are we doing here?" Korra asked. "This doesn't look like a secret Equalist base."

"We're not looking for Equalists here", Mako said as he tried to peer between the people. "We're looking for someone who might know where they took the Triple Threats."

"So she's what, in the triad?"

"No."

Korra raised her eyebrows in alarm. "She's not another cop, is she?"

"No, she's just... Let's just say she knows a lot of shady people", Mako replied. He stopped one of the passing waiters who, Korra noticed, wasn't wearing any shirt. She wondered if that was a Fire Nation custom too. "Hey, is Kira here?"

"Yeah, I think she's in the kitchen - wait a second, I'll go get her."

The waiter disappeared through the revolving doors. After a minute, someone else emerged from them. It was a tall, slender and pretty girl in a skirt and a really small top, balancing two trays above each other on one hand. Her black hair was piled on top of her head and she wore more jewelry than anyone Korra had ever seen; it all chinked as she skirted around the counter.

"Mako!" the girl exclaimed and glomped him in a one-arm hug. Mako patted her awkwardly on the back. As she parted from him, she noticed Korra. "Who's this?"

"This is, uh –" Mako hesitated, scratching the back of his neck.

"I'm Korra", Korra interjected. The girl's eyes narrowed and then went wide as plates.

"No wait – Avatar Korra?"

"That's right", Korra confirmed, crossing her impressive arms and raising her chin up.

Kira's face lit up in an excited smile. "Wow. I thought you looked familiar, it's so great to meet you! If Mako didn't tell you, I'm Kira. I gotta take these orders to the tables, but I'll be right back, find a spot by the counter and ask for some chips or wings if you're hungry."

Korra was still processing the entire exchange when the other girl disappeared into the crowd. Whatever she had been expecting Mako's contact to be like, this wasn't it. Kira seemed far too... sparkly to know so many shady people. And as far as first impressions went, Korra didn't like her.

"Come on", Mako said and pulled her sleeve. They made their way to the counter and happened upon two empty stools. Mako crossed his fingers and sat there quietly staring into space, but Korra nudged the waiter behind the counter and told him to bring them some food.

"What are you doing?" Mako asked. "We're not here to eat."

"Well I'm starving", Korra argued. "We've been looking for Bolin all day and got poked by chi-blockers, we deserve a break. And some chicken wings. So you don't have to eat if you don't want to, but I'm gonna."

Mako sighed as Korra dipped a tortilla chip into some hot sauce and bit on it decisively. She didn't have the time to eat more than a couple before Mako's friend reappeared and circled to the other side of the counter.

"So where'd you leave Bolin?" Kira asked. "We got a new hot sauce I know he'd love to try."

"That's why we're here", Mako replied solemnly. "Bolin's missing."

In a hushed tone he recanted the day's events, with some unclearly mumbled interjections by Korra, from Bolin's attempt to collect money by Dancing Pabu Show to his recruitment to Triple Threat business and their encounter with the Equalist chi-blockers. Kira's face fell the further the story progressed, and by the time he got to the part about the Equalists, she gasped loudly.

"What the flameo?" Kira hissed. "Since when have Equalists been kidnapping people? I've heard rumors they're training people, but all they've done so far was passing flyers and yelling nonsense into megaphones."

"Since today, apparently", Mako said. "Look, I – we could really use your help. Do you know where they're based? Or at least know some people who might?"

Kira sighed. "Equalists are not exactly the kind of people I prefer to hang out with", she said. "But I'll talk to people, check some stuff out. If they're targeting triad members now, some of them are bound to have noticed something."

"Thanks", Mako said and managed a little smile as he rose up from his chair. "We better go now, if you're all finished eating", he added sharply to Korra.

"Whuh?" Korra replied, frowning.

Mako rolled his eyes. "I'm gonna go to the mens room, you can finish up by then. And don't go anywhere."

Korra repressed the urge to stick her tongue out to his back, mostly held back by the food still in her mouth. Kira shook her head and chuckled, which made Korra realize she had been left alone with this overtly friendly, sparkly girl in her sparkly outfit. Well, to be fair, the outfit was shared by all the other waitresses that had passed them, except for the long, red fingerless glove on the right hand, that seemed to be Kira's own thing.

"Charming, isn't he?" Kira remarked.

Korra didn't know how to respond to that, so she just made a noncommittal "huh" sound. She put the bones in her hand down on the plate and flexed her fingers; the tips and the joints still felt a little numb. It scared her a bit, even though Mako had assured that the feeling would pass.

"Still feeling it?" Kira suddenly asked. "The chi-blocking?"

Korra raised her surprised gaze to the other girl. "Yeah, how did you know?"

Kira leaned forward to whisper closer to her ear: "I can help you with that. Just... not here."

She left the counter and started walking towards the entryway, gesturing Korra to follow. Out of curiosity more than anything, Korra wiped her fingers clean and followed the waitress to a door marked with a "Staff Only" sign. It opened up to a narrow corridor that led to the waiters' break room, it seemed, only they didn't go there. Unexpectedly, Kira opened another door, snatched Korra's arm and pulled her into a – storage closet, judging by the shelves of vegetables and cans she got a brief look at before the light flickered off.

"Damn it, not again", Kira muttered. "Oh well, I can probably do it without seeing."

Promptly she grabbed Korra's shoulders and turned her around. Korra wasn't too fond of having her back turned, or of the thumbs prodding around her shoulder blades, but she'd already followed a girl she hardly knew into a dark closet.

"So it's just the arms?"

"Yeah", Korra replied, trying to concentrate on the row of spices lit by the small crack in the ill-fitting doorframe. "So... how do you know Mako and Bolin?"

"We were all street kids", Kira replied as she poked Korra's left shoulder. "As I was older and wiser, I occasionally tried to keep them out of trouble – or at least get them out of it. They're like little brothers to me."

Korra was taken aback by two things – first by what Kira had told her, but mostly by the series of quick, sharp jabs around her shoulder that immediately followed.

"Hey, ow! You could have warned me", Korra hissed.

"Sorry, but if I had warned you, you'd have stiffened up, and that would've been harder for both of us", Kira said. "How's that?"

Korra moved her arm around a bit and curled her hand into a fist, searching for any kind of numb spots. Lastly, she lit up a small flame on top of her palm. "It's all better now. Where did you learn to do that?"

She heard Kira shrug. "Most people who learn chi-blocking only bother to learn the first part. Sometimes it's useful to also know how to undo what you've done."

"So Mako and you're not – I mean, you've never...?"

"What, dated?" Kira bursted into laughter; Korra felt the tip of her bangs tickling her neck and was glad the other girl couldn't see her blushing. "No. No, spirits, no. He's not exactly my type."

As the next series of jabs came, Korra was prepared for it. That did make it feel more uncomfortable, but afterwards her right hand felt just as responsive as the left one.

"Thanks", Korra smiled over her shoulder.

"Anytime." Kira smiled back. "We better get back, I don't think Mako can handle losing more people right now."

It was a good guess, because when they returned to the restaurant, they found Mako circling frantically, almost tearing at his own hair.

"I thought you'd left, where did you go?" Mako asked Korra and then turned his accusation to her companion. "I should've known better than to leave her with you."

"What a vote of confidence", Kira remarked dryly as she grabbed some paper bags from beneath the counter. "Look, I get off work in an hour or so, I'll go check out a few places. Meet you at the Central Station in four?"

"Okay", Mako said. "And uh... thanks. And sorry. I'm just really worried about Bolin."

"I know", Kira said, smiling softly as she reached out to stroke his cheek. "We'll find him, I promise."

Korra watched the exchange silently, a little suspicious. But even though she didn't have siblings, it reminded her of this one time she had seen Jinora comfort Meelo after he'd scraped his knees. Mako tightened the scarf around his neck and left for the doorway. Before Korra could follow her, Kira thrusted two paper bags at her face.

"Here. Take these with you."

Korra blinked as she tentatively took the bags. "Thanks, but... I don't have any money on me."

Kira shook her head. "I got it. Just see to it that he eats something. He gets insufferably cranky when he's hungry."

Korra raised a doubtful eyebrow. "You mean he's not cranky now?"

Kira chuckled, and Korra joined her. Maybe her initial impression had been a little hasty. Mako's sparkly, pretty friend didn't seem so bad, after all.

 

***

 

Korra yawned and leaned against the back of the bench of the trolley stop near the Central Station. She and Mako hadn't quite made it to their meeting with Kira; after accidentally falling asleep at the park, they had had to run away from police (in Korra's case, again) after trying to interrogate the protester. But since they had no idea where to head next, the place seemed as good as any. Beside her, Mako idly munched on the crumbled chips while reading the leaflet for the fifth time.

"You sure tha-haaat Bolin is gonna be there?" Korra asked, letting her eyes drift shut just for a moment. The morning sun was so warm and she was still so tired...

"He's gotta be. Otherwise, why would the Equalists have taken him and the Threats?" Mako replied. "They must be planning to do something to them. Now we just need to figure out -"

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a quickly approaching and achingly awful sound that roused Korra from her pleasant haze. A grey moped curved in front of the trolley stop, leaving a long, black mark on the street, its driver partially obscured by a helmet and a cloud of exhaust fumes. Korra didn't realize who it was until the driver had removed her helmet and waved off some of the fumes.

"Oh, hey! I didn't recognize you with so many clothes on", Korra greeted. Only after Mako gave her a weird look did she realize what she had said. "Er, I mean -"

This time makeup-less Kira chuckled. "Yeah, it's my best disguise", she said, running her fingers through the ponytail she had tied to one side. She still wore a cropped top, but she had some loose grey pants and a jacket on, with sandals tied around her ankles. It made her look much less sparkly and kind of boyish, really. "Where were you guys? I kept looking for you when you didn't show up."

"Sorry, we fell asleep. But we found this", Mako said and handed her one of the leaflets. "I think that's why they took Bolin."

Kira skimmed over the leaflet and her eyebrows rose. "So that's what they're doing in there."

"Doing where? Did you find him?"

"I found some Kais that had seen a truck and some bikes racing by. I managed to track them to this old, abandoned factory, but I couldn't get in because the surroundings were crawling with people, Equalist henchmen probably." Kira turned the leaflet over. "If this is happening tonight, I better sneak in before they start. Best case scenario, I can smuggle Bolin out without anyone noticing. Worst case... well, a crowd is good for a distraction."

"You're not going alone. We'll go too", Korra said.

"You mean, you too?" Mako repeated, a little surprised.

"What, did you think I would drop out now?" Korra replied. "Of course I'll go."

For a moment, she thought Mako looked almost touched.

 

***

 

As the night descended, Korra and Mako found their way to the supposedly abandoned factory. They waited around the corner of another building, adjusting their scarves and hats to avoid being recognized as the Avatar and... well, some guy. Just as Korra had managed to hide all her hair under her cap, she heard – or rather, sensed – someone dropping down behind her.

"Whoa, hold up", Kira said, quickly pulling down the red scarf over her face. "It's just me."

Korra dropped her arms back down and let the fire around the die out. "Why did you sneak up on me like that?"

Kira shook her head. "Sorry, bad habit."

She peeked around the corner. A light was coming out of one of the doors that people seemed to be drifting towards in groups of two or three. A cold breeze that had nothing to with the night air blew against the back of her neck. She took a deep breath and turned towards the others.

"Okay. I'm gonna find a backdoor to sneak in and scout around", she said. "If I find Bolin, I'll look for you."

"What if we find him first?" Korra asked.

Kira pulled the scarf back over her mouth and nose. "I'll know." She then put her hands into her pockets and skulked off into the shadows.

"She does that", Mako replied to Korra's questioning look. "Come on, let's go."

Kira ambled along the surrounding buildings like just a random face in the night trying to get home, quiet but not too quiet, examining her target out of the corner of her eye. There were some cars parked outside of it and a few people scurrying along, probably making last-minute preparations for whatever was about to happen inside. As soon as she spotted an unguarded door on an upper level, she made a sprint towards it. As silently as possible, she climbed up the ladder, picked the lock on the door and slid in through the crack, trying to keep the creaking in minimum.

Inside, it was dark save for the ambient light through the smudged window. Kira prowled along the corridor, dodging the chains hanging from the ceiling. She heard muffled voices in the distance, but couldn't see the source of them until she reached the end of the corridor. It opened into a small hall with old, cobwebbed machines. On the opposite side was a stairway – and four Equalists talking to each other.

Kira looked up and narrowed her eyes, scanning for an alternate route. There were some pipes that ran further than she could see, hopefully across the room. Tugging her sleeve up, she pointed her arm towards the thickest of them and launched the cable.

Once up, Kira rewinded the cable, spread her arms a bit and started walking. The pipe was about the size of her thigh, and she was used to balancing along much thinner ropes. However, those ropes weren't usually slick with oil and covered in old pigeonrat poop that could crackle and give her away. She took careful steps, avoiding the poop piles and trying to concentrate on the task at hand (or feet) rather than the conversation down below.

"I can't wait for the show."

"Yeah, it's time for those thugs to get what's coming to them."

"If you ask me, we should've started this a long time ago. Those bender gangs have been out of control way too long."

 _Like you're any better_ , Kira scoffed in her mind. Soon – tonight, if their claims were true – the Equalists would do something truly illegal, and Lin and the police department would crack them like eggs -

It happened very fast. Her toes hit something and made it bounce off the pipe.

Point seven seconds later, Kira was hanging from the pipe by her feet, her fist closed around the small metal nut. Eyes wide, she stared at the Equalists right below her, her heart racing two hundred miles per hour in her chest.  _Don't look up. Don't look up. Please don't look up right now._  She was fairly confident she could take them all, but not before they could alert the others and demolish all possibility of discretion in this operation.

After a few seconds, during which Kira didn't even dare to breathe, she concluded that the thugs hadn't noticed her and very slowly, very quietly pulled herself back up. Luckily the door at the top of the stairs was open, and she was unable to swing herself through.

Now there was another noise, the kind of murmur not made by a few people, but a few dozens. There wasn't a solid concrete floor here like in the previous rooms, only rusty metal net through which the light below shone. Curiously, Kira padded closer and peered down.

It seemed she had inadvertently arrived at the backstage of the Equalist rally. In the huge hall below, there were dozens, if not hundreds of people (that many, how could there be that many?) facing at the stage beneath her feet. It was decorated with even bigger versions of the creepy banners she had seen in the park. Kira tried to find Korra and Mako, but the crowd was too big. The most important thing was to find Bolin. She thought she should get down a level, maybe she could find him before the "show" started.

She was just about to leave her spot when a big trapdoor in the stage opened. In its place, a platform rose, revealing a row of Equalists in greyish uniforms, masks, and goggles, and a hooded figure that stood in front of them all. She didn't need to guess twice who that was, and she definitely wasn't interested in hearing whatever he had to say.

But then he spoke. And her heart froze in her chest.

" _My quest for equality began many years ago."_

Kira recognized that voice. She had never been able to forget that voice. She had been haunted by that voice in her nightmares for the past thirteen years.


	6. Ghost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently I forgot to update over here... Sorry about that.  
> If anyone wants to see what I picture Kira to look like, here's a character ref sheet I made back when I started this fic: the-only-constant-in-life.tumblr.com/image/68092999545

 

**CHAPTER FIVE: Ghost**

 

_"_ _Okay, mom told me to come and drag you outside, if necessary", Haru announced as he walked into the library. "What are you doing holed up here, anyway?"_

_At first Kira didn't answer, just kept sitting there by the pile of books, her back turned to him. When she did speak, her voice was small and cracking._

" _I found it", she whispered._

_Haru frowned in confusion. "Found what?"_

_Kira swirled around, and he saw the glimmering paths along her cheeks. She held up a thick, leather-covered book, one of the expensive historical chronics in the family library that she wouldn't normally touch even with a stick._

" _This!" Her small finger tapped on the picture on the spread, a man dressed in regal attire knelt down before a boy in orange garb. "This is the part I've been looking for. Listen: 'For his ill will to destroy all life outside of Fire Nation, Fire Lord Ozai had to be stopped, but Avatar Aang did not want to commit the crime of murder. So the spirits bestowed him with a gift to render the Fire Lord incapable of destruction and thus bring peace upon the world.'"_

_Kira stared at her brother intently, feverishly. Haru sighed and laid a hand on her shoulder._

" _Kira... we've talked about this", he said gently. "I know what happened to Fire Lord Ozai, but it's not the same thing."_

" _How is it not the same thing?" Kira exclaimed and shook his hand off her shoulder. "Look, the book shows Aang putting his thumb on his forehead, and there is a flash of light, and then he can no longer bend. Just like me!"_

_Haru swallowed. "The Avatar was the only one who could do it, and he was no longer alive. It's just not possible."_

" _But it happened to me!" Kira shouted, another tear falling down her red cheek. "Why won't you or – or anyone believe me?"_

 

***

 

" _As you know, the Avatar has recently arrived at the Republic City. And if she were here, she would tell you that bending brings balance to the world."_

Amon continued his speech, only interrupted by cheers and boos, but Kira didn't register any of the words. Nor could she see on the stage below; her vision was blurred, only showing her a sick yellow light. The voice echoed in her skull like drums, beating against the bone, breaking her from the inside.

It was Amon. Amon was him. The masked man that had stolen everything from her had become the leader of the Equalists. Rationally, Kira still couldn't wrap her head around it. Or anything, really, because she couldn't think, she couldn't  _breathe_. An ancient survival instinct took over, covering her mouth with her hand so her gasps of air would not be so loud.

She jerked when a hand landed on her shoulder.

"What are ye doing here?"

Turning around, Kira saw three identical, flesh-colored blobs floating in the air. After she wiped her eyes, the blobs gained more human features and merged into more or less one head. She still couldn't speak, so she merely stared at the man, gaping like a fish. He picked her up and tilted his head, as if he wasn't quite sure what to make of her.

"Ye're not supposed to be up here", he said. "Are ye lost?"

"Don't touch me", Kira breathed.

The man leaned closer. "Wha?"

It too came from the instinct deep within her spine. A jab to the elbow joint, a knee in the midriff, the ball of the foot to the underside of the jaw. The man grunted as the air was pushed out of his lungs and stumbled back. Kira fell into a fighting stance, every muscle fiber taut, still trying to adjust her eyes to the world that kept tilting stubbornly to the right. When the man raised his head, his expression was a lot less friendly.

Pulling a baton from his belt, he charged forward. Kira dove under his swing and aimed for the spot between his collar bones, hitting it with her fore- and middle finger. As he gurgled, she jumped up and delivered a spinning kick to his temple. But before she landed, something smashed into her other knee. The baton, she realized as she tripped backwards, gripping the railings to avoid falling on her back. The next hit swooshed past her head as she dodged it and buried her knuckles into specific parts around his arm. Using his temporarily useless arm as leverage, she spun to his backside, pulled off the scarf around her neck and wrapped it around his.

The man gasped and flailed around with his arms as Kira spun the scarf tighter in her hands, but he wasn't flexible enough to reach her. She pushed her healthy knee against his back, pulling the scarf with her entire body weight. She saw the vein at the back of his bald head become more purple and counted the seconds. One, two, three... At four the man became inert and fell backwards. Kira fell with him.

For a moment she just breathed heavily, still gripping the scarf knuckles white. As she gathered her wits enough to roll her head to the side and look down, she saw that nobody below had even noticed the scuffle above them; they were too transfixed by what was happening on the stage. Amon had his thumb pressed on Lightning Bolt Zolt's forehead, and she watched his lightning fade to a blaze and then... nothing. A tiny whine escaped her lips, but then she spotted something that, momentarily, snapped her out of her personal horror show.

Bolin, tied up, at the end of the line of thugs. Amon was going to – going to –

Kira shoved the unconscious man off and ignore the stinging in her knee as she braced herself up. Forgetting about stealth, she ran to the other side of the upper backstage and down the first stairs she came across. She didn't care that the stage was still full of Equalists, she had got to get to Bolin before – before –

The corridor behind the stage was full of smoke... or no, not smoke, just vapor. Kira didn't have time to wonder about it before something collided with her.

After the initial yelps and general confusion, Kira found herself staring into a pair of familiar green eyes.

"Bolin?" she said and blinked. "Bolin! Are you okay?"

"Kira?" Bolin replied. "What are you doing here?"

"No time to explain", Mako's voice spoke in the vapor, and soon the boy himself emerged, lifting his brother to his feet. Simultaneously, a pair of strange but strong, tan hands did the same to Kira. "Weve got to get out, do you know an exit?"

After a split second of thinking, Kira tugged Mako's arm. "This way."

She led them to the general direction of the door she had used to enter the building, hoping that the maze-like corridors of the factory wouldn't lead them astray. They ran into a couple of Equalists in uniforms, but Korra and Mako literally blasted them out of the way. To Kira's relief, they soon arrived at a familiar hall, ran across the dim corridor and into cool, open air.

"You first", Mako said after Bolin and Korra had already disappeared over the edge.

"This is not the time to be a gentleman", Kira argued, but started climbing down the ladder. Mako followed suit. She had almost breathed a sigh of relief when suddenly electricity shot through the ladder into her arms.

For a moment, Kira's vision blacked out as the back of her head connected with the cobblestone street. Coming to, she saw blurs of Mako and Bolin fighting another Equalist, one that wielded electrified batons in each hand. Before Kira could even get up the help them, Korra had earthbended him into the wall and called a huge, white animal to pick them up (in the heat of the moment, Kira didn't even question this). The Avatar grabbed her as she rode past and the strange group took off to the alley.

After a dozen blocks or so they were certain they weren't followed. As soon as Naga stopped, Kira slid off its back and staggered on her shaking feet. She leaned against a wall and let the cold, uneven tiles scratch her back as she slowly slid down.

"Is everyone alright?" Mako asked.

Kira squeezed her eyes shut and took deep breaths, trying to hold back the panic that was still struggling to surface. All her limbs were shaking, up to the tips of her fingers. Suddenly, she felt something soft and most pressing into her cheek and her eyes shot open, only to discover a pair of concerned dark eyes in the middle of wild fur.

"Kira? Are you okay?" Bolin asked. Wearily, Kira turned her head to his direction.

"Never mind about me, are you?" she replied. "He didn't get to... did he?"

"Take my bending? No", Bolin said a hundred times more nonchalantly than she could ever have. "It was scary, though. Thanks for coming for me."

"Anytime." Kira smiled weakly and raised her shaky hand to rub Naga behind the ear. Ryu used to do the same thing when she was having nightmares, only his beak was dryer and harder, and occasionally he nipped. "What kind of a dog is this, anyway?" she asked. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Naga's a polar bear dog", Korra replied. "They only grow on the Poles."

"She's cute", Kira said and received a long, wet lick in return. "Thanks. It's not like I just washed these clothes or anything."

They all laughed, not because it was terribly funny but because after what had just happened, they needed it. Eventually it was Mako that brought them back to the grim reality.

"What are we gonna do now?" he asked. "We've got to tell someone what Amon can do."

"I'm gonna go back to the island and talk to Tenzin", Korra replied. "He'll probably send out a search party if I won't get back soon, anyway."

"I'll go talk to Chief Beifong", Kira said as she hobbled up, using Naga's back as support, and massaged her throbbing knee. "She needs to know about this."

Thinking about Lin immediately made Kira feel more secure. Lin would know how to handle this; she would bring down the Equalists and their leader and bury this nightmare as quickly as it had emerged.

 

***

 

It didn't take long for Kira to arrive at the police headquarters; Korra had insisted on giving her a ride after the Avatar had healed her knee. Kira climbed up to Lin's window, but as the Chief's office was dark and empty, she took the more unusual route: the front doors. Yuan was behind the reception desk and was so surprised by her appearance that he almost dropped the file in his hand.

"Kira!" he blurted. "What are you doing here? I mean, it's good to see you, but I didn't think -"

"I need to see the Chief", Kira interrupted him as she strode up to the desk. "Is she here?"

Yuan blinked and cleared his throat. "Er, no, she's out after some crook." He scanned the dirt, dust and the general ruffled up look of her face and clothes. "Is something wrong? Maybe I can help you."

Kira shook her head. "No, you can't", she said quietly. "I'll wait for her, then."

"But I don't know how long she's going to be -"

"I'll wait", Kira repeated with more emphasis. "It's important."

She didn't know how long she waited sitting on a bench in the entrance hall; there was a clock on the wall, but her mind was too preoccupied to keep track of the time. She did know that she managed to burn through three cups of coffee that Yuan kept bringing her before she finally spotted a familiar figure leading a small entourage. By then, she had reached that weird state of being dead tired but too jittery to even sit still.

Kira bounced off the bench and sprinted across the hallway. "Chief Beifong!" she yelled, almost colliding with the woman as her boots slipped on the freshly waxed floor.

"Kira?" Lin expertly caught her by the arms despite her surprise. "I don't have time right now, I've got to get these two locked up", she said, nodding to the two handcuffed thugs surrounded by the policemen behind her.

"I'm not here just to see you. I mean, I am here to see you, but -", Kira argued, lowering her voice. "Something really terrible is happening and I need to talk to you. Please."

Lin examined her for a moment, until the unusual desperation on Kira's face apparently convinced her. "Alright", she said and turned to the nearest policeman. "Book them and take their statements if they decide to cooperate. If not, tell Saikhan to interrogate them. I need to handle something."

 

***

 

Kira jumped a bit when Lin turned on the lights in her office. She cocked an eyebrow and watched carefully as the young woman fiddled with the ends of her scarf and kept casting glances to the shadowy corners. It was unusual for Kira to appear so... skittish.

"Were you in a fight?" Lin asked as she bent the door closed.

Kira blinked rapidly. "What? Yeah, but it was just one guy, I'm fine."

Sensing no lies there, Lin leaned against her desk and crossed her arms as she kept examining her fidgety friend. "So, spill. What are you here for?"

First, Kira took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Okay. I was at the Equalist rally -"

"The Equalist rally?" Lin repeated. "What were you doing there?"

"A friend of mine, Bolin, went missing, so his brother Mako looked for him and found out Equalists had taken him along with some Triple Threats, so he came to ask me if I had any info. I asked around and ended up in an old factory where they were gonna hold the rally, so Mako and Korra and me went to -"

"Hold on", Lin interrupted as the word bleeped in her radar. "Avatar Korra? How do you know her?"

"Mako introduced me, she's in his probending team – but that's not the point." Kira waved her hands impatiently. Lin had to disagree; instantly, she had a bad feeling of Kira and Korra associating at all. "The point is, they went in in disguises and I snuck through the back door. I saw..." She paused and took another deep breath. "Amon was there, and he made a speech, and then the other Equalists brought in the Triple Threats they had snatched and he..."

Kira's voice faded away again and she uttered a hollow laugh as she stared out into the streets.

"You're probably not gonna believe me."

"I've believed some pretty preposterous things from you", Lin pointed out, tilting her head. "Try me."

Kira bit her lip as her fingers spun around the scarf, hard enough to turn her knuckles wide. When she spoke, her whisper echoed in the room.

"He took their bending, Lin. He pressed his finger on Zolt's forehead and I don't know what he did, but after that, Zolt couldn't firebend anymore."

"That's not possible", Lin said flatly. "Are you sure?"

"I know what I saw", Kira replied. Lin stared at her solemn, unblinking eyes and, after a few heavy, silent seconds, nodded.

"I believe you, but – how is that possible?"

"I don't know, but it doesn't matter! The Equalists need to be stopped before they can do that to anyone else! I know Lightning Bolt Zolt's a greedy bastard and a lousy tipper, but he didn't deserve that!" Kira had strode over as she spoke, and Lin felt her heavy breathing against her face. "Nobody deserves that."

Lin was still processing the literally unbelievable news, but the bearer of them concerned her even more. In all these years, she had never seen Kira so agitated and... panicked, almost. But whatever had happened during the recent few hours to shock the young woman so much, now was not the time for emotional damage control. Not that Lin would've been much help with that, anyway.

"I agree. Amon and the Equalists need to be stopped."

Kira's shoulders slumped, as if a huge rock had rolled off them. "Good", she sighed. "So what are we gonna do?"

Lin raised an eyebrow. "I'm going to inform the men first thing in the morning. We'll start an investigation and round up any Equalists we legally can hold.  _You_  are going to go home, get some rest and not poke your head into any more ants' nests."

"But –!"

"No buts", Lin said firmly as she took hold of Kira's shoulders. "You look like crap, and could't do anything about this matter right now anyway. You can tell your bender friends to be careful and not wander alone at night, but other than that..." She softened her voice. "Leave this to police for now. Can you do that for me?"

She could see the fight in Kira's eyes, but finally the young woman nodded. "Okay", she said in a small voice. "Spirits know I could use some sleep."

"Good." Lin should have let go of the other woman's shoulders at this point, but Kira looked so weary and so lost she almost wanted to pull her closer and hold her. It was such a weird impulse and she didn't know where it had come from. She didn't follow what impulse, but she didn't pull her hand away when Kira's small, cool fingers intertwined with hers. If it gave Kira some kind of strength, then Lin supposed it was alright. Only when Kira let go, smiling a little sheepishly, did Lin speak again.

"Do you need a ride?"

Kira shook her head as she stepped away and swept her bangs behind her ear. "Thanks, but I'll walk. I could use some fresh air."

 

***

 

"So I throw the stick, you run up to me and jump, I catch you and you catch the stick?"

"No, I need to start running before you throw it, or I won't have time to catch it."

"Okay. I'll count five beats and you start running at three?"

"Yeah, let's try that. What's the worst that could happen?"

"We catch on fire and break our necks, not necessarily in that order."

Kira grinned. "An ordinary night, then."

Less than a week had passed from the fateful Equalist rally, but for Kira, it had felt like months. Lin had updated her that she had assigned more men to searching possible Equalist hideouts and capturing any Equalists for questioning. So far they had caught a few, but they had proven very stubborn and even when they had cracked, they didn't know much; apparently their head honchos were smart enough not to share much information with their henchmen. Kira knew it was good progress for such a short time, but knowing the Equalists and Amon were still out there... it was like walking on burning coals, fearing that at any moment she could catch on fire.

Because she had promised Lin, she had tried to occupy herself with other things. Her job, the teashop, going to really seedy bars, and practicing fire arts. As she was now, standing on a balance beam facing Jarow, one of the guys in their group. They had already gone through their established routines, so the rest of the time was allotted to improvisation and brainstorming. Which had led to this genius plan that had, like most of their stunts, potential to go horribly wrong.

"Hey guys, I'm gonna turn the radio on", Ann Lee shouted from the corner. "I'm gonna go crazy if I have to listen to this same record one more time."

"Yeah, whatever", Kira responded, waving her hand, as she concentrated on mapping the number of steps it would take to reach Jarow.

The music paused as Ann Lee took the needle off the record, and for a moment, all they heard was the clanking of a passing tram and the sawdust it dropped off the ceiling. Their practice space wasn't impressive, just a room in an old gym right next to a busy tram track, but at least it had a springy floor and most of the gymnastic equipment they needed. There was a bit of white noise before the room was filled with saxophone-heavy, jazzy tones.

"Okay, you ready?" Jarow asked. He spun the stick in his fingers casually to the rhythm of the music. As Kira nodded, he started counting. "Five, four, three -"

Kira sprinted towards him on the beam, graceful and springy steps, short enough to let her jump up and not right into him. Suddenly, the radio made some noise again, but that wasn't what threw her off.

It was what came next.

" _Good evening, my fellow Equalists. This is your leader, Amon."_

The effect of that voice on Kira was the same it had been last time. Like a bucket of ice water was poured on her, her breath was knocked out of her lungs and she completely forgot about her surroundings. Somehow she managed to stumble to the other side of the beam, but instead of jumping over Jarow's head, she ran straight into him, her forehead collecting with his nose with a loud crack. With much yelling, they tumbled down from the beam and hit the floor just as loudly. The fire stick shizzled as it hit the ground.

"Oh crab, what de flameo, Kira?"

"What happened?"

"Are you guys okay?"

Kira didn't hear any of Jarow's cussing or the concerned question of her friends. She laid on the floor, frozen in the position she had landed, clutching her elbow but unable to feel the pain radiating from it. Next to the voice on the radio, everything was a distant echo.

" _... proving once again that the bending oppressors will stop at nothing to squash our revolution..."_

"Kira?"

Kira jerked when a hand landed on her arm. Frantically she turned her head and stared into Ann Lee's worried brown eyes.

"She's alive", Ann Lee announced to the others.

"Ob course ze is, ze ladded on me", Jarow grunted. "Ow, I dink I cracked a rib."

"Okay, okay, everyone give them some room and get out of my way!" Suri shouted as she elbowed through the others. She scanned both of them briefly and then decided that Jarow's injuries were a higher priority, as she kneeled beside him and opened the water satchel she had brought.

The broadcast ended as abruptly as it had begun and was replaced by the host wondering what had just happened. Kira slowly returned to her senses, just in time to hear the nauseating crack when Suri bent Jarow's nose back to its place. Tentatively she sat up and wiped cold sweat off her brow, glad that she already had a sheen of sweat to conceal it. She turned to her friend, laying on the floor and biting his teeth together to not whine when Sura mended his nose.

"Jar, I'm really sorry", Kira said. "I... I slipped or something. But Suri can fix you, right?"

"It's not the first time I've fixed his broken nose. Won't be the last", Sura replied. "How's that?"

Jarow carefully brushed the bridge of his nose. "I guess it's fine. At least I can breathe", he said. "But you owe me for this."

Kira frowned. "Just so we're clear, I'm not gonna wingwoman for you again. I'm good, but not that good."

The others laughed. "Go ahead, kick the guy who's already down", Jarow grumbled. Kira pulled her lips into her usual grin, hoping nobody noticed how weak it was.

 

***

 

The next time Kira visited the police station, she entered discreetly through a back door. She had to persuade the door a little to get it open, but she had to be stealthy; certain people would start talking if they saw her going to the station out of her own free will too often. With a few donuts in a paper bag in tow, she strolled along the corridors and greeted the first officer she ran into.

"Hi Shui!" She waved her hand. "Do you know if the Chief's around?"

"Last time I saw her, she was heading to the gym", the woman replied. "But I wouldn't go there if I were you. She is pissed."

"Can't blame her", Kira replied. "But I think I'll take my chances."

"Your funeral." Shui shrugged and walked past her, but then turned around and gazed over her shoulder with narrowed eyes. "Wait a minute... what are you doing here? Civilians are not supposed to wander in this part of the building."

Kira feigned ignorance. "Looking for the bathroom?"

Shui returned to her and crossed her arms. "You're just begging to be arrested, you know that right? I'm gonna need one of whatever smells so good in that bag to forget about this incident."

"You're a rotten cop", Kira grinned as she opened the bag and Shui reached into it to grab a donut.

"I just got off duty, not my problem", the policewoman stated and tasted the glazing. "Anyway, turn left and go down the stairs. Just follow the pounding."

Shui's advice proved quite apt. As soon as Kira got to the staircase, she heard a loud, almost rhythmic noise echoing in the walls. Curiously she crept towards the sound on the balls of her feet to avoid being knocked over whenever the corridor around her shook. She cracked open the steel door and peeked in.

The gym didn't resemble a gym as much as a stone lair beneath the station. It was quite dim, only lit by the tiny windows at the very top of the room. Kira saw some equipment in the corner of her eye, but her attention was immediately drawn to the other side of the room, the source of all that awful noise; a lone woman bending large pieces of stone at the targets on the wall with fury that shattered them on impact. Lin was wearing nothing but a tank top and grey pants, and the sheen of sweat on her shoulders glimmered in the dimness. Kira swallowed hard.

Suddenly a boulder crashed into the wall not far from her head. Kira yelped and jumped aside.

"How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me?" Lin asked as she turned around. Her voice, not to mention her expression, was so scathing that Kira almost,  _almost_  regretted coming.

"Sorry. I just... figured you'd need some cheering up", Kira said and eyed the targets, most of which were unrecognizable at this point. "I see I was not wrong."

"I'm fine", Lin snapped. She walked away from the dent she had been digging in the floor and grabbed her water bottle. "Despite whatever Councilman Tarlok seems to be thinking. Bloody prick."

Kira was momentarily distracted by a drop of water that ran down the other woman's chin and continued its way down her neck. "Um... yeah, he is, totally. Would it make you feel better if his house burnt down? Because I know some guys."

Lin didn't laugh, but at least her frown became a little bit less steep. "The last thing I need is his task force screwing up my investigation and the Equalists they manage to catch getting off scot-free through some loophole because he doesn't know shit about putting protocol to practice." She roughly wiped water from her lips and huffed. "I'm pretty sure I'm not good company at the moment."

Kira shrugged. "I don't care. I mean, I'll go if you want me to, but..." She bit her lip. She had the overwhelming urge to wrap her arms around the older woman or wipe off the hair strand that was glued onto her temple, but she knew Lin. In a mood like this, Lin was about as touchy-feely as a hungover dragon. Kira's eyes wandered towards the tatami. "Would you like a sparring partner?"

Lin frowned. "What?"

"Well, it must get boring to fight the targets, they don't even move", Kira reasoned as she slipped her jacket off her shoulders. "It'll let you blow off some steam. No earthbending, no smoke bombs, just good old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat."

Lin shook her head incredulously as she wiped her forehead with a towel. "I don't want to hurt you."

"Oh come on, you gotta give me a bit more credit than that", Kira grinned as she put down the paper bag next to the jacket and kicked off her sandals. Then, with a couple of sudden vaults, she was standing less than a foot away from the other woman. Lin's hand had wrapped around her wrist as soon as she had raised her arm, but Kira grinned wider and stood on her tiptoes to reach her eye level. "Or are you worried that you can't handle me anymore?"

"Don't try to provoke me", Lin said in a low tone that sent shivers down Kira's spine. "I'm not in the mood."

"You know I like living a little dangerously", Kira smirked. Spinning around, she detached the grip around her wrist and cartwheeled to the tatami. "Come on. Dance with me."

Lin shook her head, but she threw the towel to the ground and followed her. Watching the older woman stalk towards her with a murderous look on her face made Kira question the brightness of her idea, but she didn't have time to ponder about it further before Lin lunged at her.

At first, the fight was pretty equal, despite the differences of their styles. Kira was used to constantly being on the move, ready to jump and drop and dodge, like a hummingbird on caffeine. Lin did no unnecessary moves, every single step had a purpose, and she didn't bluff; when she striked, she meant it, and Kira could either get out of the way or prepare to have the air knocked out of her lungs. In a strange way, they complimented each other, the constant push and pull of their swings like the dance of a raging typhoon.

"You okay?" Lin asked when Kira was doubled over after a nasty hit to the solar plexus. Not that it was nearly as bad as it could have been; Kira was pretty sure Lin's bare fists could break bones if she were so inclined.

"Nothing to worry about", Kira assured, batting the water out of her eyes.

"Are you sure? Because we can stop if you want to."

Kira narrowed her eyes. Lin was still in battle stance, fists held up, chin low, yet the frown was almost completely gone and a smile briefly tugged at her lips, and Kira didn't care about the flash of pain or the bruises on her limbs that were certain to develop. As a response, she snarled and sprinted towards the older woman.

Kira did succeed in scoring a few hits, but as she was aiming a kick (or a graze, really) at Lin's temple, Lin grabbed her ankle mid-spin and twisted. Kira lost her balance and fell, but not before she could wrap her feet around Lin's torso and pull her to the mat with her.

Very soon Kira discovered that had been a bad move. One, she didn't have much experience fighting on ground level – usually, if she ended up there, it meant she had seriously screwed up - and two, Lin was stronger than her. Of course she was, with all those perfectly built muscles, but it became much more evident as Kira tried to wrestle her. She mostly managed to get out of Lin's holds with her flexibility, but that didn't help her for long.

"Just tap when you want out", Lin breathed next to her ear, an arm around her throat and the other hand wrenching her arm behind her back. Kira gnarled and tried to push herself up, but Lin was straddling her back and she wasn't strong enough to throw her off.

"Screw you", Kira hissed. As a last resort attempt, she arched her back as far as it would go and landed a kick in the other woman's mid-back. It wasn't very powerful, but it startled Lin just enough that her grip loosened and Kira could turn her shoulder a bit and reach behind her with her free hand.

She hadn't meant to do what she did next; all she intended was to push Lin away, but an instinct took over. Before Kira even had time to think, she had striked a few particular spots around the arm that was holding her down.

The good thing was, Lin immediately let go and backed off of her. The bad thing was, horror immediately filled Kira like someone had poured it down her throat. She scrambled up and spun around.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to do that!" she gasped. "I just – it was a reflex, I didn't -"

Lin looked at her numb arm, blinking, and then to Kira with the same stunned expression. "I didn't know you could chi-block."

It was like a rope wrapped around Kira's neck. She swallowed as she scooted closer to the other woman. "Yeah, I don't exactly advertise it", she muttered. "If you stay still for a second, I can undo it, just let me..."

Carefully Kira laid her fingers on Lin's shoulders. The skin felt burning hot under her hand, or maybe her fingertips were just icy cold, with all the blood in her body drawn to her frantically beating heart. She traced the lines Lin's muscles drew around her shoulder, locating the pressure points.

"How long have you been doing that?" Lin asked.

"A while", Kira replied. "I don't do it often, I don't like it, it just... Well, you know the kind of people I hang out with. Sometimes it comes in handy." She administered a series of quick jabs around Lin's arm. "Did that do it?"

Lin raised her hand, and a boulder emerged from the dent in the floor. "Seems that way. It feels normal, too."

"I'm really sorry, really am", Kira said again, brushing Lin's jawline with her fingertips. "I didn't mean -"

"It's fine", Lin interrupted as she closed her hand around Kira's. Kira's heart that had just began to pacify skipped a beat. "This was just the thing that missing from my horrible day. Getting chi-blocked at my own station."

Kira's spirits crashed even lower before she saw the rare glint in Lin's jade eyes. It spread into her like pollen, made her shoulder shake and her teeth bite into her lips before she bursted out laughing, leaning into Lin's shoulder to avoid falling down completely. Beside her ear she heard the loveliest sound, a low, quiet chuckle that she had only caught a handful of times in all these years. Their hands still interlocked, Kira propped herself up enough to see Lin's face lit up with delight, and she was overtaken by so much feeling she thought she could burst open.

Suddenly, the door opened and startled them out of the bubble that had formed around them. Lin's hand slipped out of Kira's as Captain Saikhan's head apprehensively peeked out of the doorway.

"Chief, I just got some information that I thought you would -" He paused as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. "Oh. Am I disturbing you?"

Lin cleared her throat, her expression hardening back to the Chief of Police. "No, we're done sparring." With one move, she stood up and pulled Kira with her by the arm. "I'm going to take a shower and then I'll be right with you."

Saikhan nodded and disappeared from the doorway. Kira shifted on her legs, weak for a reason that had little to do with the sparring match. Lin let go of her arm, but not before turning back to her and giving her a small smile.

"Thank you."

"What are friends for", Kira replied, grinning despite the little piece gathering in her throat.

 

***

 

She was running. She had been running for hours, days, weeks, but they never stopped following her, the bloodhounds.

She came to a halt when she turned a corner and nearly ran into a wall. It wasn't supposed to be there, there was supposed to be an alley, she was certain of it. Kira glanced over her shoulder, saw the shadows of her stalkers deepening, heard their cries much too close. Taking a deep breath, she found the deepest crevices in the wall that she could reach and jumped up.

But the wall wasn't solid; it melted under her fingers like candle wax. It was too late for her to pull back, she fell through screaming, and for a moment she couldn't breathe, the wax dove into her lungs as she inhaled.

It only lasted a moment, though. Her knees hit the floor as she stumbled down, and first she saw only blinding lights. Dozens of lights, coming from spots overhead all around the stage. She realized it was a stage when her eyes adjusted to the light and she saw the figures surrounding her, all wearing a white mask on their faces like characters in a kabuki play. Before she could get up, a couple of them lunged at her and grabbed her arms.

"No! No, let me go!" Kira shouted and struggled, but their grip was like vices. The audience clapped, like they had no idea, like they though it was all part of the play... or they were in on the plot. Her body froze up when one masked man parted from the group and stepped towards her, holding his hand up to her head.

"No", Kira whispered. "What are you going to do to me?" she asked, demanded, but the man gave no answer. "What could you possibly do?"

The man stepped closer, closer still. Her temple was ticking, like a vein was threatening to pop under the skin.

Kira woke up to that ticking, flailing around with her arms at the offender. She couldn't see anything in the dark, but she heard a screech and felt a rush of air as it took off. Several horrified and disoriented seconds later she came to realize that she was still in her own apartment, in the middle of the night, and Ryu stared at her judgmentally from on top of a shelf, his yellow eyes gleaming in the dark.

"Oh it's just you", she breathed, still gasping for breath as she sat up. Her hand shook as she raised it to wipe the icy sweat off her forehead and hit something soft that turned out to be a small red-white feather.

"I'm sorry, buddy. I didn't hurt you, did I?" she spoke to the hawk. Ryu responded by tilting his head and rattling the edge of the shelf with his claws. "I'm fine. It was... it was just a nightmare. I'm fine."

Kira shook her head to banish the ghosts of the dream dancing at the edges of her corneas. Reaching to the small table next to her futon, she felt around until her hand hit a candle and a box of matches. She lit the candle and cradled it on her palms like it was a small porcelain animal, concentrating on the flicker of the flame and the heat on her skin. A drop trickled down her nose and fell down from the tip, sizzling as it was engulfed by the flame.

Ryu hopped onto the pillow and headbutted her side. Kira smiled with the corner of her mouth and stroked his head.

"Okay", she said after a moment of consideration. "You can sleep there for a while, I'm going out."

She put the candle on the table, stood up and searched for the clothes she'd worn during the day. Ryu studied her and clicked his beak as she folded the red scarf over her nose.

"There's something I need to do", Kira explained. "Don't worry, I'll be okay."


	7. Fall

**CHAPTER 6: FALL**

 

Lin was not a party person. Especially not when the party was an inflated gathering of the so-called cream of society, and especially when it was held for the new Avatar. But one of the negative aspects of being the Chief of Police was that she was obligated to attend these kinds of pointless events, so she endured it. But she would only stay for the minimum amount of time that was socially acceptable, and she certainly wouldn't wear a fancy dress.

Idle small talk she, unfortunately, could not avoid. After the brief meeting with Councilman Tarrlok and Korra, she was stuck in the company of the cousin – or second cousin? – of the Earth Kingdom's council representative who apparently could talk for several minutes straight without pausing to breathe. Lin retorted mostly with "mm-hm" and "aha" and had tried to pass the time by sipping a drink, but it was so nauseatingly sweet she considered dumping it into the nearest flower pot. She hardly noticed when the background music ceased and Tarrlok spoke into the microphone.

"…as for the tonight's entertainment, our original performers were hindered, so there's a change of program. Please welcome a rising group of fire artists, aptly named Firebirds!"

"What?" Lin suddenly awoke.

"Yes, it's awful, isn't it?" the representative's cousin replied. "Restricting the use of iguana parrot hide in clothing production is trampling on our civil rights –"

"Not that", Lin interrupted. "What did he just say?"

The lights faded and people gazed around curiously as the band blasted a dramatic drum roll. A couple of long cloths tumbled down from the ceiling over the stage next to a wall; they were easily seen because their ends were on fire. Some people gasped, but Lin didn't blink an eye. She had seen that entrance before.

Many people didn't know this, but Lin enjoyed watching performance arts, as long as they were decent. And Kira's group, she had to admit, had developed to be more than decent. She watched as several dark silhouettes slid down the cloths and lit their pois, staffs and fans. Half of their equipment blazed with blue flames that earned more exclamations from the audience, reminiscent of Fire Lord Azula's signature firebending; Lin happened to know it was the result of a chemical concoction, but still, it was an impressive trick.

The performers started out in two groups, one with the red flames and the other with the blue ones, trying to one-up each other, like two warring families. Soon they merged and split into pairs, dueling very convincingly in the eyes of someone who didn't know anything about fighting. A real fight was rough and sharp and when done correctly, very short; this was a fluid, graceful display, made all the more dramatic by the dance of light and shadows cast by the fire, constantly in movement. But Lin understood the mix-up, because some people's fighting resembled a dance. Kira's did. Speaking of Kira, Lin had tried to find her among the faces painted with red and gold, but had become quite convinced the young woman wasn't there.

That was until a young man with fans "killed" one of the girls in the red group, and her allies rushed to avenge her. But before they could reach him, another figure emerged from up above, easy to spot because purple flames followed its outreached arms like wings. It descended quite fast, and the moment its feet touched the stage floor, its skirt ignited and engulfed it in huge, roaring fire from head to toe. When the most of the flames died out, revealing a slender woman with two fire sticks and ring of fire around her head like a halo, the audience clapped. Lin smiled.

The spirit of purple fire proceeded to attack everyone regardless of their side, as if she were enraged by the bloodshed. She twirled around the others and dodged their attacks, light as the wind and fast as lightning. Despite all the other performers surrounding her, Lin couldn't take her eyes off Kira. There was something absolutely mesmerizing in her fluidity, the way every step, strike and pirouette seamlessly followed the next. Not that Lin would ever tell her that; Kira didn't need any more encouragement to pull more death-defying stunts.

One by one, the red and blue ones took a hit and their fire went out, signifying their demise, until there was only one left in each side. They looked at each other and apparently decided it wasn't worth it, stilling in their places. Finally satisfied that she had brought peace, the purple figure became consumed by flames and disappeared into darkness.

People blinked as the lights were turned back on. Lin used the moment of confusion to escape the other party of the previous conversation and slipped out into a corridor. The air felt much cooler against her face there, she hadn't even noticed how hot it had been in the hall. It must have been all the fire. After a few minutes, the spirit of the purple flames, only no longer on fire, appeared from behind the corner and beamed as she spotted Lin.

"I'm so hot, I'm gonna die", Kira announced, snatched a drink from the tray of a passing waiter and emptied half the glass in one gulp. She almost wiped her forehead until she seemed to remember her face was still painted unrecognizable in purple, red and gold. "So, you come here often?" she asked as she reached Lin and wiggled her eyebrows.

Lin huffed. "I didn't know you'd be here."

"I didn't know I'd be here until three days ago", Kira replied. "It was a very last-minute booking, so we kinda had to scramble together a performance. And it needed someone who was willing to be dropped fifteen feet with this tiny wire and set on fire by one of our firebenders, so..." She shrugged and took another gulp. "What did you think?"

"You were beautiful", Lin replied, realized what she had said and cleared her throat. "I mean – the show was beautiful, and you were pretty good, admittedly. I liked that there was a story in it. Although I'm curious, how did your hair not catch on fire?"

"Thank you", Kira smiled and ran her hand over her hair, tied into big bun on top of her head. "The trick is plain conditioner, it's amazingly fire-resistant. Are you gonna finish that?"

"No, but it's awful. Too sweet. Wouldn't drink it if I were you", Lin warned as she gave her still nearly full glass to the younger woman.

"I don't care, I'm famished", Kira said, tilted her head back and poured most of the contents of the glass into her mouth. Before she could swallow and announce her opinion on it, Councilman Tarrlok appeared.

"Wonderful! I found exactly who I was looking for", he said, and for one cringe-worthy moment Lin thought he was talking to her, but he outright grabbed Kira's hand as he reached them. "I just had to come and greet the star of the show personally."

Kira's eyes widened as she stared at the man, cheeks ballooned with liquid. It would have been funny if Lin didn't have a low opinion of the councilman as it was, and his expression as he leaned towards the younger woman, far too close for someone he'd just met, made Lin's jawline twitch.

Kira swallowed loudly. "...Thanks, but it was a group effort. And Dhari handles most of the choreographing, so you'll want to talk to her -"

"I am Tarrlok, the Councilman of the Northern Water Tribe. But I'm sure you already knew that", the man said, as if he hadn't heard a word he said. He bowed down, grabbed Kira's hand and planted a kiss on the back of it. "Does a lovely vision such as yourself have a name?"

"Um... Kira. No official title here", Kira replied, laughed nervously and carefully tried to scoot closer to Lin and away from Tarrlok.

Lin's first instinct was to grab the young woman, take her far away from the man's reach and growl at him for good measure, but she knew she couldn't do that. She eyed the metal rim of the glass in Kira's hand and suddenly got an idea. With a small, subtle flick of her fingers – not that Tarrlok paid any attention to her, anyway – the glass had tipped just enough to pour the remains of its contents on Tarrlok. More specifically, the ridiculous white handkerchief he wore at his belt.

"What the -!" Tarrlok jumped and finally let go of Kira's hand, who quickly retreated to Lin's side.

"Oh no, I'm so sorry! How clumsy of me!" Kira exclaimed with an exaggerated gasp and brough her hands to her mouth.

"Nevermind", Tarrlok said through gritted teeth and tried to pull a smile on his lips. "Accidents happen. I'll just go clean this up..."

Kira waited until the man was out of earshot to burst laughing, leaning on Lin's shoulder to contain herself. "My hero", she giggled. Lin smelled the smoke in her hair, mixed with the fruity scent of the conditioner and something that had to be just Kira.

"Anytime", she replied, trying to hold back a grin and barely succeeding. She awkwardly patted the young woman on the back until she was able to stand on her own two feet.

"But seriously, thanks", Kira said as she wiped the corners of her eyes. "That guy is creepy. Korra told me he's tried to get her join his 'Task Force' by sending her these extravagant gifts. I mean, he sent her a fancy sports car. Who thinks they can buy the Avatar by shoving enough stuff at her?"

Lin raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. "I've never liked him. I've met crime bosses less grimy than him."

Kira grinned, but before she could reply, a couple more familiar faces appeared. Or rather unfamiliar, because both young women also still had their face paint on, and Lin couldn't have named them for a police report even though she was pretty sure she had met them passingly.

"By spirits, Kira, we're a mega hit!" one of them yelled. "We're getting so many inquiries, you gotta come with us to talk to all these people!"

The girls grabbed their slightly bewildered friend and started dragging her back to the hall. "Uh, see you!" Kira called out at Lin over her shoulder.

 

***

 

Kira liked the afternoon shifts at the tea shop. After the lunch rush and before most people got off work, it was very peaceful and quiet. She usually spent most of the time filling and organizing shelves and listing the products they were low on stock on rather than serving customers, and with the chaos in the Hotman, it was a welcome change of pace. Smiling, she handed Mr. Bosu a cup of cinnamon tea – the man came three times every day, on morning, noon and before closing time – and turned to the next customer, a girl her age with a dark brown bob and pine-green eyes.

"Don't tell me we have practice, I totally forgot and you had to come look for me", Kira said.

"No, I just – I need to talk to you about something", Ann Lee said and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. "When do you get off?"

"And you can't talk to me here?"

Ann Lee shifted on her feet. "Not really, it's… kind of personal."

Kira raised an eyebrow. "Well, okay. I need to go to the restaurant straight from here, but wait a minute…" She hopped over to the entrance to the storage room and peeked between the curtain. "Mrs. Chai, mind if I take a lunch break now? I can finish the list of orders after that."

"I can take care of the orders of my own shop. You go eat, get a little meat around your skinny bones!" yelled an old woman's voice from the back.

"So… was that a yes?" Ann Lee asked.

"Pretty much", Kira grinned and finished scribbling on the notepad. "Let's go."

They went to a noodle bar a couple blocks away. The street level was an open space, but the upstairs was divided into small lodges. Their walls were merely paper, but at least it gave an illusion of privacy. The women took their orders and climbed upstairs, settling into a corner lodge with a small window out into the street.

"So, spill. What's up?" Kira asked, pouring mustard into her ramen bowl.

Ann Lee straightened her already perfect gymnast's posture and took a long time chewing a piece of tofu before she started talking. "I was thinking the other day... have you kept up with your chi-blocking?"

"Yeah. It's been useful, you know, on occasion", Kira replied a little reluctantly as the last time she had used that particular skill flashed through her mind. A cold breeze of air brushed the back of her neck and she shook off a shiver. "Why?"

"Are you busy? I mean, I know you're always pretty busy, but do you have any free time at evenings?"

Kira frowned. "What are you getting at?" She narrowed her eyes and pointed her chopstick at her friend. "Is someone giving you trouble? Is it that idiot ex? Because if he's harassing you again, I swear I will cut -"

"No, it's not him", Ann Lee interrupted. "And I'm not in trouble. Hopefully, at least. It's..." She took a deep breath and spoke everything in one long sentence. "I know what you think about the Equalists but I've been going to some meetings and they have really good points and last time they asked if we had any friends who might be interested in joining our ranks and since you already know chi-blocking, I... well, I thought of you."

Kira's every sense faded. She stopped smelling the spices in her food and tasting the small piece of seaweed on her tongue. The sunlight and its warmth disappeared. A mushroom between her chopsticks dropped back into the bowl with a loud plop as she could only sit there and stare at her friend as if seeing her for the first time.

"You're not serious", Kira stated blankly.

Ann Lee huffed. "I knew you'd react that way, but just listen to me, okay? It's not just slogans and grand speeches, they're really on to something about the City Council and the gangs and everything. The newspapers paint them as criminals, but they're just ordinary people who want to protect themselves and their families and make this city more fair."

Kira let out a hollow laugh. " _Fair?_ " She hit her closed fists on the table and hissed, "I don't know how they've brainwashed you, but there is nothing fair with what they're -"

"They haven't brainwashed me!" Ann Lee hissed back. "You of all people should know how dangerous some benders are! You know what Han was like! And you know way better than me what all those gangs do to people – just look at what they did to you back then!"

Kira stirred. "You have no idea about what was going on then", she said slowly. "Or now."

Ann Lee scoffed. "Do you think we're all stupid? Just because you're all quiet and sneaky about that stuff doesn't mean we don't notice when something's going on. I saw the burns when Suri was patching you up. Don't tell me you wanted to learn chi-blocking just for fun."

Kira's jaw clenched. "So I needed to defend myself from one or two thugs who happened to be benders. That doesn't justify what the Equalists are doing."

"Are you sure?" Ann Lee asked, deadpan.

" _He took their bending!"_  Kira said so loudly that if there was anyone in the next few lounges, they had to overhear. "That's like – that's like ripping someone's heart right out of their chest, you don't  _do_  that!"

"They were criminals!" Ann Lee argued. "They've been terrorizing the city for years, and now they can't do that anymore."

"Do you think they're going to stop there? Just take the bending from 'bad' benders and leave it at that?" Kira asked coldly. "No. They're going to do that to everyone! Our friends included, Suri and Dhari and the others – are you gonna look them in the eye then and tell them it was  _fair_?"

"You don't know that", Ann Lee said.

"Yes I do."

A silence descended and the temperature dropped so low the sun could have died. Ann Lee was the first to move, wiping her mouth before she cleared her throat and stood up.

"Just thought I'd ask", she said quietly. "Forget I said anything."

Kira gazed into her cooling ramen bowl long after Ann Lee had left, something slowly dripping inside her chest like drops of the soup dripped from the edge of the bowl.

 

***

 

A tram rolled next to the gym building and rattled sawdust right on the bottom of Kira's feet. She frowned and jerked her foot, moving one of her hands to reclaim her balance. Taking a deep breath, she let her arms bend until her forehead was brushing the floor, and passingly noted that someone should really sweep up their practice space before it caught on fire.

They had started the day's practice yet, because a couple members of the crew that had promised to attend hadn't shown up yet. Well, just one after Jarow had bursted in, late and out of breath as usual. The others were warming up, stretching or dancing along the music from the radio and avoiding Dhari, who was working on some new choreography by swaying around with her eyes closed. She did that.

"Has anyone seen Ann Lee?" Suri asked, bending the water she had been casually pouncing around back to her pouch. "She's not usually this late."

A chorus of shaken heads and no's followed. Kira bit her teeth together and exhaled loudly as she pushed herself back up.

"Maybe something's up with her grandfather?"

"I think she'd have said something. Besides, he seemed fine last time I went over."

"I any case, we need to start", Suri said, glancing at the clock on the wall. "There's some other group coming here right after -"

There was a knock on the door. Everyone turned to look, a little surprised that Ann Lee would bother to knock. They were even more surprised when the door opened and didn't reveal Ann Lee, but a small, elder man with round glasses and a very official-looking uniform. Or what was visible of it, anyway, from behind the huge flower bouquet he was carrying.

"Um, hello?" Dhari greeted him. "Are you... looking for something?"

"As a matter of fact, yes", the man replied. "Is there a -" he paused to check the card hidden in the bunch, "Kira here?"

Every head in the room turned slowly to stare at Kira's direction. It wasn't a pleasant position to be in, especially when upside-down. Kira lowered herself down and rolled up, eyeing the messenger suspiciously.

"Depends who's asking", she replied.

The man cleared his throat and continued reading the card. "Councilman Tarrlok would like to invite you to a night in the opera on Friday, eight pm. Enclosed in the envelope is the ticket with more information."

A few seconds passed in utter silence. Then a few people started snickering and someone made a long, annoying whistle.

"He would like to what?" Kira repeated with a deep frown. "Why?"

The messenger made another unnecessary cough. "According to my understanding, the Councilman was quite taken with your individual performance at the gala and would like to become better acquainted with you."

"Guess you can put it like that", Jarow muttered just loudly enough for Kira to hear as she passed him, rousing more laughter. Kira walked over to the messenger and picked up the card and the envelope, examining them critically.

"Is this legit?" she asked, switching her scrutiny between them and the man. The opera ticket, at least, looked real as far as she knew – though she only knew because Lin had taken her to the opera a few times, she could never have afforded it by herself. Although some of her friends were just the kind of pranksters to pull something like this, it seemed like an unusually elaborate and expensive hoax.

"Why, yes, completely legitimate", the messenger responded, correcting his glasses.

"Okay", Kira said and put the ticket back into the envelope. "Well, you can tell the Councilman -"

"That she appreciates the offer but politely declines", interrupted Dhari, who had appeared beside her as fast as lightning.

Kira frowned at her. "That's what as I was gonna say. Not in those exact terms, but -"

"Really?" Dhari raised an eyebrow. "And that would not have included the word 'shove'? I am not letting you ruin our PR."

"..." Kira sighed and stuck the envelope back into the flower bush. "Just tell him I said thanks but no thanks, or something to that effect. Now excuse me, but we really need to practice."

Kira gave the man a little push so he was out of the doorway and shut the door. Like clockwork, most of her so-called friends started laughing at that point, Jarow the loudest. He was sitting on the balance beam and holding his sides, practically howling.

"Wow, I didn't know you have such high-ranking admirers. Soon you'll be a total sellout and won't even talk to us lowly ordinary citizens."

"Shut up", Kira scoffed and pushed him off the beam.

 

***

 

It was dark, quiet and cloudy, the kind of night that raised the hair up on one's back without a reason. Ann Lee eyed every corner with suspicion, double-checking that the shadows in the distance didn't move. She had tried to tell herself that she wasn't doing anything illegal, that she had no reason to worry, but still every unexplainable sound made her jump a little.

That's why she sensed it before it happened, the swish of air as someone appeared behind her and tried to grab her. Ann Lee yelped and dodged the outreached hands, quickly backing off several feet as she turned around to see the perp winding in the wire they'd used to land behind her.

"Leave me alone!" she yelled. "I don't have any money!"

Deaf to her protests, the perp sprang at her. Ann Lee stepped aside and focused on the line of their spine, preparing to literally knock them of their feet. But as if reading her thoughts, the attacker blocked her hands and took hold of her arm, using it to throw her over their back to the ground. Ann Lee barely had time to register the eerily familiar jabs around her shoulder before one of her arms went numb and the other was bent behind her back.

"Let me go!" she screamed. "What do you – umphf!"

Her sentence was interrupted by a gloved hand pressing on her mouth. She kicked her feet furiously and struggled as icy cold fear spread through her body.

"Where is Amon?" a low, gravelly and totally fake voice spoke beside her ear. This actually made Ann Lee less panicky, first because her attacker wasn't interested in her and second… there was something familiar about the voice and the scarf she saw hanging beside her head, red with frayed ends.

"Wait… Kira?" she said as it clicked in her head. "What the heck are you doing?! Were you following me?"

The person on top of her shifted as she pulled the scarf off her nose and mouth. "Damn it, how did you know it was me?"

Ann Lee huffed. "One, you wear that scarf all the time. Two, there's only a handful of people who know chi-blocking, especially well enough to beat me at it. Three, that was such a bad impersonation, who were you trying to be?" She struggled some more. "Now get off of me!"

Kira responded by pressing harder on her shoulder blades. "Not before you tell me where he is."

"Who, Amon?" Ann Lee tried to frown at the other woman over her shoulder. "What do you want with him?"

"What do you think, invite him to a tea party?"

Ann Lee twitched her fingers, feeling if sensation had returned to her arm yet. "I don't know where he is, none of us do. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't tell you if I did."

"I don't believe you", Kira growled, grabbing a handful of Ann Lee's hair and pressing hard enough on her locked wrist to make her cry out. "Tell me, or else -"

"Or else what?" Ann Lee scoffed. "You're not some scary thug, I've known you for six years. You're not gonna hurt me." Kira didn't reply. Ann Lee tried to stare at her friend half pleading, half angry, and found someone else's eyes. "You wouldn't."

 

***

 

The next time Lin visited the Hotman, or rather stormed through the doorway, she did it alone. After glancing around the restaurant, she spotted her target serving food to a table. Tapping her fingers against the side of her arm, she waited impatiently until Kira left the table and hurried to the younger woman.

"We need to talk", Lin hissed and grabbed Kira's arm.

"Nice to see you too, what's on fire?" Kira replied.

"Don't pretend not to know what I'm talking about." Kira feigned perfect innocence. Lin narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. "A friend of yours was found tied up by the police station in the morning with a note addressed to me, and you're telling me you know nothing about that?"

"Every time something happens, you think it's me", Kira said and slithered out of Lin's grasp. She started walking towards the counter, picking up empty dishes as she went, and Lin followed her like a hound. Before the young woman could disappear into the kitchen, Lin stuck a piece of paper in front of her face.

"I recognize your handwriting. Even when you try to change it."

Kira halted and sighed deeply. "Okay, fine", she said. "Just a second."

She dropped off the dirty dishes to the kitchen before leading Lin to the staff area and opening a door into a dark closet. Lin raised an eyebrow, but she went in and Kira followed her and pulled the door shut before reaching up to turn on the single lightbulb.

"So?" Lin said, crossing her arms.

"So?" Kira repeated and climbed up to a higher shelf, pulling down a basket and starting to gather vegetables in it. Lin studied the scratches on her left hand and the shadows under her eyes."What do you want me to say?"

"What the flameo -" Lin started yelling and then remembered to lower her voice to a low, but no less angry hiss. "What the flameo do you think you're doing?"

"Look, she confessed to me she had joined the Equalists. After I followed her, caught her in the act and confronted her, I didn't know what to do because I didn't want her telling everybody so..." Kira shrugged. "I thought you'd like an Equalist gift-wrapped and delivered to your doorstep."

For a moment, Lin's mouth hanged open at the young woman's nonchalance. "That's not how it's done! You should have told me or one of my officers or, spirits, even Tarrlok's task force. What am I supposed to hold her on, your word?"

"You can hold her for a day, right? Question her and make her fess up. You can be pretty intimidating if one doesn't know you." Kira flashed her her usual charming grin, but this time it did nothing to soothe Lin's temper.

"Even so, you had no business playing cop and following her on your own!"

"I had to be sure!" Kira said, and her casual expression began to break. "I thought she was my friend, I – I guess I didn't want to believe she'd actually go and join them."

"'Was' your friend?" Lin repeated.

"Yeah", Kira said, staring down at the bell pepper in her hand. "Was."

They both startled when someone suddenly started yelling outside the closet. "I have had it with you bringing your girlfriends to work! You better be talking to yourself in there or I swear you're fire-"

Mrs. Palo yanked the door open and blinked as she took in Kira's company. The tall, rail-thin woman just stood there speechless and flustered until Lin wiped off some invisible dust from her sleeve and cleared her throat.

"I apologize for stealing your employee's time, but I had some urgent questions for her", Lin said in her most official tone and hoped sincerely her cheeks were not as hot as they felt.

"Of – of course, Chief", Mrs. Palo stammered. "It was a misunderstanding, I didn't mean to bother -"

"It's no matter", Lin said as she stepped out of the closet and nailed Kira with a sharp look. "We will continue this conversation at the station once your shift is over."

"I'll get off around eleven", Kira pointed out.

"I'll be there", Lin replied curtly, turned her back to the still baffled restaurant owner and left the premises. The evening air felt blissfully cool against her cheeks.

Mrs. Palo cast a suspicious glance at Kira. "What was the Chief of Police doing here, asking you questions? What have you done?"

"I haven't done anything", Kira said with a greatly offended expression. "For all you know, you may be talking to the key witness in a high profile case."

Mrs. Palo scoffed. "You're a key anything in your dreams", she said and chucked an apron at the waitress. "Put this on and go to the kitchen, the cooks need an extra pair of hands."

 

***

 

Lin wore a coat over her uniform as she rose up the stairs to the sixth floor of Kira's apartment building. She didn't know how much Kira interacted with her neighbors, but she figured it was better if the entire block didn't know that the police were knocking at her door. Fortunately nobody passed her in the stairs; the only sound she heard was a baby crying somewhere on the third floor.

As she reached Kira's apartment, Lin knocked quietly, just in case the young woman had lent her apartment to some friend to crash in. That would make what she was about to do next very awkward for everyone.

When nobody answered, Lin carefully metalbent the lock and slipped in. She had been to the place a few times since the Agni Kai raid, and hardly anything had changed. There was just more kitsch and an ever-changing collection of candles. The photograph of the woman and two children was still on the same spot on the shelf, only now it was surrounded by a few more pictures of Kira's friends. The balcony door was slightly ajar, probably left open for Ryu. Lin was glad the messenger hawk was not there; although they were on petting terms, she wasn't sure how the bird would react to her intrusion.

Because to be frank, it was an intrusion. Lin had no search warrant, no owner's permission, and not even really a probable cause. But after searching Ann Lee's place (much to the dismay of the girl's grandfather that she lived with), she had been planning to return straight to the station, but somehow she had drifted to Kira's apartment. This whole deal and Kira's behavior bothered her too much. There was something more going on here, and Lin was adamant to find out what.

Shoving her guilt away, she inspected her surroundings. As usual, there was a pile of clothes on the armchair and a collection of miscellaneous kitchenware spread around every available surface. Lin circled around the room, trying to gauge where Kira would hide something if necessary. She went through all the cupboards, but found nothing more suspicious than ingredients for smoke bombs and other questionably legal paraphernalia, but Lin had always turned a blind eye to them. She closed the last door a little frustrated, wondering if her hunch had betrayed her, when her eyes hit something colorful between a stack of newspapers on the table.

It was a map of the city. That itself was not suspicious. What made it suspicious were several circles and dots drawn on the paper, some with question marks and dates. It looked eerily familiar, because they had a map with very similar markings on the wall at the police station. Lin's lips tightened as she rolled the map up.

"Damn it, Kira", she muttered under her breath.

 

***

 

It was past midnight when Kira wandered into the interrogation room, two big takeaway coffees in her hands and her sandals leaving wet footsteps on the floor. She shook her head like a canine before setting the coffee cups on the table and squeezing her ponytail.

"It just started raining, I barely escaped it", she explained. "The guy at the front desk told me to come here. I can think of cozier places for a chat, but okay. I got an extra double espresso with whipped cream, you want one?"

Lin shook her head and closed the door. "Would you sit down?"

Kira shrugged, pulled up a chair and plopped herself on it. Judging by the sound, because Lin still couldn't bring herself to look at her.

"We have got to stop meeting behind closed doors. People will talk", Kira joked. Lin finally turned around to examine the younger woman lounging in the chair, long legs crossed on the table, stirring a spoon in the coffee. She tried to spot signs of nervousness, find cracks behind that stubborn smirk, but found none. The corners of Lin's mouth tightened as she pulled the opposite chair and sat down it it. Kira was even better than she expected.

"Lin, is everything alright?" Kira asked and set her legs down as she leaned closer, perhaps noticing her grim expression.

"Ann Lee is officially under arrest", Lin replied. "We did a home search and found her Equalist uniform. After that, she cracked quite easily."

"That's... that's good", Kira muttered behind her coffee cup. "Did you get anything useful out of her?"

"Not much. Like every suspect we've interrogated, she claims that she doesn't even know the identity of most people in the same cell, let alone those higher up in the hierarchy. It's a very carefully planned organization", Lin admitted reluctantly.

Kira tilted her head and frowned as she took another sip. "Then what did you want to talk about?" she asked. "I mean, besides that you probably still want to to yell at me."

Silent, Lin stood up and walked up to the rack in the corner where her coat was hanging. She took out the rolled-up map, returned to the table and laid it down in front of the younger woman.

"Care to explain this?"

Kira flushed noticeably paler and started coughing furiously as the coffee caught in her throat. Lin waited, arms crossed, until Kira had regained her ability to speak and looked up at her, blinking her teary eyes.

"How did you get this?" Kira rasped, massaging her throat. "Did you - did you break into my apartment?"

"When the police does it, it's called a home search", Lin stated dryly.

"But why?"

"Why?" Lin leaned closer, her palms against the metal table. "How about you try to explain why you have a map of known Equalist sightings? Don't try to deny it, we have one with very similar markings."

Kira swallowed. A crack rippled through the sky above the station. "Because I've been tracking them."

Lin raised an eyebrow. "I would assume, if this was something you were going to inform me about, you already would have."

"It's not. I'm not denying that. It's..." Kira's voice trailed off and she gazed off into the corner. "There's something I have to do. It doesn't concern anyone else."

"What?"

There was another hesitant pause. "I can't tell you."

Lin stared at woman in front of her, and almost saw her turn back into a stubborn teenager, with the same glower and teeth bit together tight. Her fingers pressed harder on the table, making small indentations on its surface. "I have turned a blind eye to a lot of your activities, but this is too much! You sneak around on Equalists' heels, you capture one of them, and then you lie to me about it..." Her eyes narrowed. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you're acting suspiciously like them."

"What?" Kira scoffed, pushing herself up from her chair. "You honestly think I would have anything to do with them? After all the time we've known each other, everything we've been through, you think I could do that?"

Lin saw the hurt in her friend's face, but kept pushing. "I don't know! A couple weeks ago I didn't even know you could chi-block. With all these secrets you're keeping, I'm beginning to doubt if I know you at all."

Kira stared at her, slack-jawed, chest falling and raising; she looked rather like someone had snuck behind her and stabbed her. Seconds passed with only the rumble of the raindrops on the rooftop, as as her heart rate settled down, Lin began to regret her outburst. But before she could begin to consider apologizing, Kira spoke first.

"I can't believe you'd think that", Kira whispered, her voice cracking. She slammed the empty coffee cup against the table, grabbed the damp jacket she'd shed on the back rest of the chair and strode out the door.

"I didn't say you could leave!" Lin yelled, reprimanding herself for not locking the door. "We're not done!"

"Screw you, Chief!" Kira shouted back.

Lin breathed hot air, watching the young woman disappear down the stair, equally furious and dumbfounded. After a few seconds, she shook her head, grabbed her coat and ran after Kira.

 

***

 

Kira ran. She didn't care where, as long as it was out of the door and away from the station, away from Lin, away from  _everything._  A Satomobile honked angrily as she ignored the red light and crossed the main street, so close her pants brushed the bumper. She didn't even blink; her heart was already pounding in her chest, twice as fast as her feet. The rain stung her skin like needles, tattooing it cold and numb.

It quickly got hard to see, with all the water in her eyes and some of the lights struck down by the storm. After a quick turn, Kira crashed into something and almost fell off her feet. A flash of lightning drew the outlines of a radio tower on her retina. She breathed heavily, staring at the metal tower disappearing into the sky, and felt a sudden, mad sense of  _rightness_. Barely feeling her own fingers, she jumped up and grasped a rail.

Kira had no memory of how she reached the top, but once she did, she dropped on all fours and hit her fists against the unforgiving surface. Up here the wind was roaring, gripping all loose clothing and trying to pull her with it. Another lightning struck, so close and so bright that for several seconds, she was blind.

"Are you trying to scare me?" she yelled up to the black clouds, the void of the sky and all the possible agents of fate that might reside within it. She pulled herself up, holding onto the antenna to keep her footing. "You think you still can? I'm not afraid of anything anymore!"

The storm laughed at her with ear-shattering rumble. Kira's tears ran burning hot down her rain-battered cheeks, like hands tearing into her flesh.

"You took everything from me! Everything!" she cried out. "So come on! Bring it on! Is that the best you can d–"

The lightning emerged right above her head, shooting through the antenna into her arm. By the time she fell from the tower, she had already blacked out.


	8. Secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to apologize for going AWOL, again. I'm sure you're not interested in a list of excuses, life happens. But in my defense, I have been writing this fic in addition to this chapter, just not in chronological order, because I'm terrible.

**CHAPTER SEVEN: Secrets**

 

It was so very bright. That was different from being electrocuted by a Firebender; first there would be the light spots in one's vision, almost likes sparks, until everything faded to black. But when the actual lightning had struck her – a fraction of a second after Kira had felt the hairs on her arm stand up and realized what was about to happen to her – all she saw was blinding, white light.

But it made sense, didn't it? People who had almost died talked about a bright light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, beckoning them to walk forward. She heard that too, someone calling her name, muted as if it came from very far away. The voice was familiar and strange at the same time, and it made her curious. She concentrated on it, her brow furrowing.

"Kira?" the voice called, louder, closer this time. It was accompanied by a soft touch on her hairline, which made absolutely no sense because voices didn't have hands. "Kira, can you hear me? Open your eyes."

So she cracked her eyes open, utterly puzzled. For a while Kira saw nothing more than the same whiteness, until a flesh-and-grey colored blob appeared. Slowly it gained sharper outlines and two orbs, perfectly round and so very green, the very same shade that had become her favorite color.

"It was about time you woke up. I was beginning to worry -" the voice spoke again, this time as if it were right beside her. "For a moment you weren't even breathing, and I thought you – that you had..."

Kira blinked with great effort as the voice faded out, just as she had realized who it sounded like. "Are you real?" she asked. It was hard to get the words out, her throat was so dry. "'Cause you look a lot like Lin. Sound like her too..."

"Who am I supposed to be, the Fire Lord?" the apparition with Lin's face scoffed. The hand brushing Kira's forehead disappeared; she passingly thought it was a pity, it had felt nice. All of a sudden the tone of the voice changed completely, too. "Now that you're awake – what the flameo were you thinking, going up there in that storm?! Were you planning to get yourself killed?"

The question was left hanging in the air as heavy as a few tons of metal. With that reminder, memories came flooding back to Kira, the argument, the tower, yelling at the storm clouds before – When her vision cleared and she was able to properly see Lin's face, she discovered the kind of horrified shock she had never seen there before. Kira opened her mouth, but before she could even begin to scramble together an answer, a door above her head opened.

"Hey, you're finally awake! That's great", Korra's voice said, and soon the Avatar herself circled to Kira's view. "I brewed some tea, or Pema did. It's Katara's recipe, it should help your throat. Now I don't have to waterbend it down."

"That's... great?" Kira said, frowning. "But why are you here? And, uh -" She gazed around her surroundings, an utterly strange room sparse of furniture but filled with light that reflected from the paper walls. "Where is 'here', anyway?"

"The Air Temple Island", Lin replied curtly.

"Chief Beifong brought you here after you took that nasty hit in the storm", Korra explained further as she knelt down and set the tea tray on the floor. "Apparently it's public knowledge that Katara's taught me healing pretty well."

Kira didn't miss Korra's slight grin, or the line forming between Lin's eyebrows. Lin crossed her arms and shrugged.

"The island was closer than the hospital", the Chied justified herself. In other circumstances, the whole situation would have been quite amusing, and it still raised a small smile on Kira's lips.

"Thanks", she said. "Both of you."

"Anytime. Or, well, hopefully not, because it was pretty hard", Korra grinned as she poured tea in one of the cups. "I had to call Katara, she told me what to do. We were all pretty worried when you didn't wake up, but she said it was normal, that your body had to rest."

Kira frowned again. "Didn't wake... how long was I out?"

"Two days", Lin replied solemnly.

Kira groaned and facepalmed. Or would have, but her limbs didn't have enough strength, so she only managed to raise her arm a bit and sort of flop her hand onto her face.

"Oh gods", she mumbled behind her palm. "I'm so fired by now."

"No you're not", she heard Lin say. "I had someone call your work and tell them you'd been in an accident. They can't fire you for that, it's illegal."

Kira peered at her through her fingers. "What would I do without you?"

"I don't even want to know", Lin said dryly and Kira laughed, only to have the laughter get stuck in her throat. Lin helped her sit up and put a blanket over her shoulders when she shivered from the rush of cool air. Every bit of Kira's body ached when she moved, but it was distant pain, like pressing on a fading bruise. Korra handed her the steaming teacup, but Kira's hands were trembling, and she smiled sheepishly when Lin helped her bring it to her lips. The concoction smelled like ginger and tasted like honey and seaweed, coating her raw throat with warmth almost immediately.

"So what exactly happened to you?" Korra suddenly asked. "I mean, I know you were on the radio tower, but – what were you doing there in that storm?"

There was a long, awkward pause when Kira's and Lin's eyes met and the Avatar looked from one to the other, baffled. Finally Kira let her gaze drop down and uttered a heavy sigh.

"I was upset", she said and quickly added, "not at anyone in particular. Just... everything. The universe, existence? I don't even know anymore. This whole thing with the Equalists is driving me crazy and I've been sneaking around at night, trying to track their movements and see if Amon showed up so I could..." She didn't finish the sentence, but the other could read it in her tightening jawline. "I'm just so... tired."

"I still don't understand", Lin said. "Why have you been doing all this?"

Kira bit her teeth together, staring into the cup where the greenish brown liquid was swirling so calmly, so serenely, as if mocking the fight inside her. Korra cleared her throat and shifted.

"I, uh, can go if you two need to talk."

Slowly, Kira shook her head. "No, don't. This is – I think you should hear this, as the Avatar and all."

Korra nodded and crossed her legs. Kira took a deep breath and dug deep into her mind, the most secret compartment of her brain. Still, she hesitated under the persistent feeling that if she spoke up, it would change everything, somehow. That these two women would never look at her in the same way again.

And then she blurted it out.

"I was born a firebender."

If the previous silences had been heavy, this one was equal to a lion turtle. Without looking up, Kira could sense Lin and Korra staring at her and then each other, a cloud of question marks gathering over their heads. She took another sip of tea and closed her eyes. It seemed easier that way, seeing it in her mind's eye as if it had happened to someone else and she was merely an observer.

"I was born in the Fire Nation, to a long line of great firebenders. That's what we were too, my brother and I. One day we were playing in the forest nearby and had some sort of an argument. Haru – my brother – he left and I stayed behind, to practice my forms or something, when suddenly this stranger appeared out of nowhere. I firebended at him because he'd scared me, but didn't even hit him. He didn't seem angry or anything, but there was something about his... _presence_ creeped me out, so I started to run away. I couldn't."

Someone gasped; Kira didn't know, or particularly care, which one it was. She saw the glimmering river in the corner of her eye, heard the rustle of the trees above as the wind gently breezed through them.

"When I tried to scream, he... he pressed his hand on my mouth. Then he said – he must have been watching for a while, because he said I wouldn't want to scream or my brother could hear and something could happen to him. And all I could think was that I couldn't let that happen, I had to protect Haru. So I stayed silent even when he moved his hand away from my mouth, onto my forehead, and I felt this flash like – like the worst pain I've ever felt, except it wasn't pain, but it felt like something being ripped out of me.

I always keep going back to that moment, wondering if I could have done something differently. I wish I'd blasted off his damn head as soon as I saw him. I wish I hadn't just... stood there and taken it. I wish I'd fought."

Kira covered her face with her hand, feeling damp spots appear on her glove. She hadn't even realized she was crying. The world looked blurry when she opened her eyes, but where she had just been, she saw everything perfectly clearly.

"Kira", Lin said. Her voice sounded muffled too, like it had to struggle to get past her throat. "You were a child, you must have been... How old were you?"

"Nine", Kira replied. "I was nine years old."

"I'm so sorry", Korra whispered, her ocean blue eyes glistening. "We dragged you into the Revelation and everything – I didn't know."

"Nobody did", Kira said. "After I left home, I didn't tell anyone, and back there nobody believed me. Because it was impossible, right? In time, a part of me started to think so too, that I had just somehow screwed myself up. Then we went to save Bolin and I heard his voice -" She clutched the blanket tighter when a shiver ran through her. "He was covered up, I didn't see his face, but I never forgot his voice. I _knew_ it was him. I don't know why he's doing all this now, after all these years, I don't know who he is... but I know it's him."

Kira pressed her face onto her knees, hiding her face from the light and the pitying gazes. Now that she had let all that out, she felt hollow, like she hadn't eaten for days and the emptiness had started to carve her from the inside out. She had expected to be wallowing at this point, but her eyes were completely dry.

All three jumped when there was a sudden knock on the doorway.

"I'm sorry to disturb, but -" started a deep male voice that Kira didn't recognize, nor did she feel like turning around and showing her face at that particular point. "Oh, our guest is awake. Good. Anyway, Lin, they called from the Central Station. They told me it was urgent."

Lin nodded and the door slid back shut. She laid her hand on Kira's arm and squeezed lightly. "I'm sorry, but I have to go. You should take a few more days easy and rest."

"You can stay here, Tenzin said it's totally okay", Korra continued. "They have White Lotus here to watch over me, so it's practically the safest place you can be in. Zero Equalists."

 

***

 

So for the next couple of days, Kira stayed at the Air Temple Island. She spent a lot of that time asleep, or recuperating as Korra put it, even though she found herself waking up at night just because it was too quiet. It seemed downright bizarre that there could exist such a cradle of serenity right beside the bustling capital. To be honest, all the peace and quiet made her antsy.

Still, it wasn't a bad break. Her hosts were very hospitable and nice, even though Tenzin seemed really stiff and Pema looked so pregnant Kira wondered how she could function. Their airbender children cornered her with about a million questions every time they caught her awake, but she figured they spent so much time on the island, everyone new must be pretty exciting. However, there was no question it was Korra's company that made those uneventful days much better. They talked long into the night; Kira discovered that Korra had spent most of her life sheltered on the South Pole. Korra listened to Kira's retellings of her less life-threatening adventures with wide eyes or rolling with laughter. Kira saw a lot of herself in the younger girl, which explained why Lin disliked the Avatar so much. She felt a little guilty about that.

"...so he finds me and wakes me up, three in the morning, telling me he stole a fire ferret and certain he's going to jail. It doesn't help that Mako is really pissed off and says he deserves it", Kira recounted on the second evening. She and Korra were ambling along one of the many small paths on the island, or Korra was; Kira had taken off her sandals and was balancing on the stone fence beside it.

"So what did you do?" Korra asked, laughing.

Kira shrugged. "I talked to the owner of the pet shop the next day, and reminded him that pursuing the matter would cost him way more time and money than what the ferret was worth. Eventually he agreed to drop it after I helped him clean up the mess and paid him for three new ferrets to feed to that damn snake."

"The boys are lucky they've got you."

"That's what I do. I clean up tables, other people's messes, and occasionally the streets in cooperation with the Chief of Police", Kira grinned and patted her hands together as if dusting them.

Korra tilted her head and frowned thoughtfully for a moment. "Can I ask you something?"

The railing ended and Kira jumped down onto the ground. "Sure, shoot."

"How is it you're friends with Beifong? I mean, you're so friendly and chill, and she's so... well, you know", Korra finished sheepishly.

Kira chuckled. "Let's just say that took a while. As in, many years and multiple near-death situations."

"Like what?"

"Like the kind that's too classified to tell you", Kira smirked and poked Korra's side with her elbow. Korra elbowed her back and Kira yelped. "Hey! I'm still in recovery, remember?"

"Sorry", Korra grinned. "I can't say I get it, but she seems to really care about you. She was here all the time when you were unconscious."

Kira blinked. "She was?"

"Yeah. She could never stay long, but she came by three times a day, and demanded we call her if something happens." Korra grimaced. "Imagine trying to heal someone when she's breathing down your neck."

"Sorry about that", Kira said, but couldn't help the smile rising on her lips. Suddenly she felt warmer than she'd been for days.

They heard someone yelling behind them, and saw Mako and Bolin jogging towards them.

"Here is the thing you wanted", Bolin said after the boys reached them and gave Kira a small paper bag.

"Aw, Bolin, you're a doll", Kira replied, hugged him and inhaled the contents of the bag.

"What's in it?" Korra asked. Kira showed her, and she raised her eyebrows. "Beef jerky?"

"Yeah. It's not that the food here's bad, but -" Kira took out one slice and bit off a piece, "I need meat. And chili. Want one?"

They reached a plateau with a couple of benches and spread themselves over them. Kira idly petted Pabu after the fire ferret had finished running excited circles around her and Korra and settled on Korra's lap. They talked about the ongoing probending championship matches, argued about possible strategies, and made fun of the team that had lost against the Fire Ferrets last time. Kira took notice of the interesting triangle where Bolin kept staring at Korra quite intently, but the Avatar was too busy looking at Mako to notice and made this tiny nose wrinkle every time Mako mentioned Asami.

They were, however, interrupted by a stranger yelling from down the path. Kira sat up on the back of the bench, saw a vaguely familiar head behind the giant moving bouquet and went pale.

"Oh shit", she hissed and ducked. "Quick, I gotta hide!"

But there was nothing but sparse shrubs around the clearing, and Kira had no time to run away before the bouquet and its carrier had reached them. The teens shot the carrier curious looks while Kira buried her face into her knees.

"Ahem", the man cleared his throat and put the flowers down. "Miss Kira, Councilman Tarrlok would like to invite you -"

"Not this again", Kira grumbled. "How did you even know I'm here?"

She then narrowed her eyes at Bolin, who lifted his hands up in defense. "What? Wasn't me, I only told a couple of friends of yours that I ran into."

" - playing at the concert hall tomorrow evening", the messenger finished reading the attached card.

Korra frowned at Kira. "What does Tarrlok want with you?"

"Well it's not join his task force, that's for sure", Kira muttered and reached her hand towards the card. "Can I see that?"

The man smiled widely and handed her the card. Kira folded it a few times until it vaguely resembled an aircraft.

"Mako, a little help?"

Mako raised an eyebrow, but shot a small flame to the paper plane when Kira threw it into the air. The smile on the messenger's face died.

"Is that clear enough, or do I have to destroy that whole thing?" Kira asked the messenger. "I'm still not interested, and I'm not gonna be interested no matter how many flower bushes he sends me. Try to get that through to him, will you?"

The messenger coughed again. "Very well, I'll try. But you should know, the Councilman can be very persistent."

He then picked up the bouquet and half-ran down the path before she could make her threat a reality. All four stared after him in a long, heavy silence.

"Well, that was weird", Mako finally voiced what they were all thinking.

"Not just weird", Korra said. "He kept sending me stuff when he tried to recruit me and I thought that was creepy, but this -" The hairs on her arms stood up and she shivered. "How does he even know you?"

Kira dropped her head onto her knees. "I don't wanna talk about it", she groaned.

 

***

 

Early on the next morning Kira thanked Tenzin and Pema for hosting her and hugged Korra goodbye on the pier as the ferry tooted its horn, promising to come see the Ferrets' next game in the unlikely event that she'd get the evening free. As she lazily jogged up the gangway, she spotted a familiar silhouette against the bright orange sunrise and her steps quickened.

"Hey, you", Kira greeted, a grin spreading on her face. She felt like jumping the woman and throwing her arms around her, but was quite sure Lin wouldn't appreciate it in full view of any passing ferry staff, so she grasped her hands together to control them. "I wasn't expecting a police escort. Am I in trouble?"

Lin returned a more restrained version of her smile. "For once, I know for sure you haven't been up to anything", she quipped. They started walking towards the front of the deck as the ferry took off from the pier. "No, I thought I'd give you a ride home and see how you're doing."

"I'm good", Kira replied. "Taking a few days off really helped. Although all the peace and quiet was kind of starting to drive me mad."

"I know what you mean. I used to spent some time at the island when I was younger, but I grew up in the city and found it hard to sleep without the sound of traffic outside."

"I know, right? Last night I borrowed a radio from some Lotus guards and put it on static just so there'd be some noise."

They reached the front of the ferry and leaned on the edge, watching the waves the ship ploughed in the water, in a silence that tiptoed somewhere between comfortable and uncomfortable.

"Kira -" Lin suddenly started and turned to look at her. "I need to apologize. For breaking into your place, for accusing you of those things, and for driving you up that damn tower -"

"You didn't do that", Kira interrupted. "I did that. It's not your fault."

Lin sighed. "But I was wrong to suspect you. If I had known..." Her voice trailed away and Kira shook her head.

"How could you have? Since I came here, I really never told anyone any of that", Kira said and swallowed. "Ever."

Lin blinked. "Not even your friends?"

"No. At first I didn't want to risk my family would find me, and then I guess I just..."

Kira didn't finish the sentence. Instead she turned her attention towards the waves down below and fiddled with the frayed edge of her scarf.

"I understand", Lin said quietly. "But there's one more thing."

"Yeah? Shoot."

The woman hesitated for a moment. "The burn on your arm. You told me back then that you didn't want whoever did it to find you. You didn't seem like you were lying."

Kira bit her lip. "I wasn't. But it's also not like you think."

Lin couldn't help raising an eyebrow. Slowly, forcing the muscles in her hand to move, Kira took hold of the edge of her long glove and pulled it down her arm. The pale pink scarring glistened in the sunlight.

"That was my dad. But it's really not like you think. It's not!" she repeated adamantly and stared at Lin's skeptical expression. "He was trying to help me. You have to understand, after I lost my bending, my parents tried _everything_. They sought out healers and gurus all over the world in hopes that one of them could fix me, but nothing worked. Finally my dad decided to try something. He thought that maybe my bending was still inside me somewhere, hidden, and perhaps he could... scare it out of me."

Kira kept her gaze fixed to the approaching buildings in order to avoid seeing the shock on Lin's face.

"He firebent at me, and I was supposed to block it. I had to, because he wouldn't stop it. I agreed to it. Well, you can see how well that worked out." She let out a joyless laugh and flexed her fingers. She could practically hear Lin swallowing.

"Is that why you left?" Lin asked. "Did your parents disown you when it didn't work?"

"No!" Kira shot her an incredulous look. "You don't understand. My parents loved me! That's why I had to leave." She swallowed and slipped her hand back into the confines of the glove. "Father was angry at first, but most of the time they were just... sad, like they were mourning. All those generations of magnificent firebenders and then - this. So after I realized there really was no hope for me, and all I'd ever bring my family was dishonor and disappointment, I decided it was better for everyone if I disappeared."

She had been so focused on her arm, making sure the glove covered all of the scar again, that she didn't see the movement. But suddenly she felt two strong arms around her, squeezing her tightly. Kira's eyes widened as she became hyperaware of what was happening; Lin had never hugged her. Sure Kira ambushed the older woman with hugs all the time and Lin returned them to a varying degree, but had never initiated one.

"I'm so sorry", Lin's voice whispered beside her, so softly Kira wasn't sure if it was real or the wind playing with her ears. Regardless, her eyes drifted shut on their own accord and she inhaled the scent of jasmine and metal, an odd but distinct combination she had come to associate solely with Lin. With every second they stood there, her feet became more steady, more connected with the deck, as if she'd been floating before like a ghost.

The horn took them both by surprise and made them jump a bit. Lin looked a little embarrassed, so Kira tried to reassure her with a smile.

"Thank you", she said. "But please don't keep looking at me like that."

Lin frowned. "Like what?"

"Like I'm broken", Kira replied. "I'm not saying it wasn't hard, but I've had years to deal with it. I'm fine. So please don't start treating me like I'm one of those people crying in the station lobby at two in the morning."

Lin cleared her throat and nodded. "Alright", she said. "Looks like we're docking."

They left the ferry in the same semi-comfortable silence and weaved their way among the shipping containers. Lin had parked her car behind the corner of a storage buildings; luckily she valued her privacy to the point where she had equipped her civil vehicle with tinted windows, or there might have been some questions about why the Chief of Police was dropping Kira home. Kira quickly juggled through the radio stations, setting it to the preppiest, most annoying song she could find, but to her disappointment, Lin didn't turn it off.

"About those nighttime excursions of yours", Lin said after they'd driven for a while, keeping her gaze on the road. "I wish I don't have to tell you they need to stop."

"Oh, no", Kira replied lightly. "I have a much better plan now."

Lin braked abruptly at the stoplight and turned to glare at her. "You better be joking."

"No, no, hear me out!" Kira insisted. "I thought about this while I was bored at night and couldn't sleep, it checks out. Ann Lee said the Equalists are looking for more members. I can tell them I found them through her – I mean, it isn't even a lie, technically – and she can't blow up my cover while she's locked up. I bet they'll love me since I already know chi-blocking and all."

"Absolutely NOT!" Lin barked; an accompanying rockslide couldn't have had more weight. "That is the worst plan in the history of bad plans -"

"Come on! I remember you complained to me that you can't get anyone infiltrate them because they'd be recognized as cops -"

"I didn't mean _you_ should go instead!" Lin gripped the wheel hard, her eyes darting between the traffic and her passenger. "I wouldn't let you do that anyway, and especially after everything you told me -"

" _Let_ me?" Kira scoffed. "After what I told you, did you really think I can just sit on my butt and do nothing while they go on destroying people's lives? I'm not asking your permission, Lin, I told you because I didn't want to keep lying to you and because..." She swallowed. "Because you're the only one I trust to bail me out if something goes wrong. I'd rather do it with you backing me up, but I'll do it either way. There's no cell in the world where you could lock me up in that would stop me."

For several minutes, Lin didn't respond, didn't even look at her. Kira was eerily taken back to that time many years ago when she'd run off to catch a dangerous bender by herself – which, in hindsight, had been a little reckless – and Lin had been so mad at her she'd lost her words. But this wasn't some childish attempt to play hero, and Kira desperately hoped her friend would realize it.

"It's strictly to gather intel", Lin suddenly said. "You won't try to sabotage them. You won't stick out in any way. The second there's trouble, you'll get out. And I don't care if Amon himself walks in, you will. Not. Attack them. Do you understand?"

She spoke like she were speaking to her officers at a briefing. Kira nodded.

"I'm serious. I'm not going to be responsible for you getting yourself killed", Lin continued. She sighed and her voice softened. "I'm agreeing only because I know you'll go and do something even more stupid all by yourself."

Kira smiled in relief. "I'll take that."

"And you're sure you can do it? Stare an Equalist recruiter in the face and say you want to join them?"

Kira knew what Lin was asking, even if she didn't specifically say it. She swallowed, hazy memories of her reaction at the rally floating to her mind's eye, accompanied by the shivers that ran through her spine every time she heard his voice, real or imagined. She shook them off and nodded again.

"I'm sure. At least, sure enough to try", she said.

Lin shook her head wearily. "I must be crazy."

Kira grinned. "I have that effect on people", she replied as she glanced out of the window. "Hey, did you realize you're already two blocks past mine?"

Lin swore under her breath. "Shut up, or I'll have a full police escort drop you off at your front door."

Kira laughed. It was like the air inside the car suddenly got a whole lot lighter; Lin being snarky was, if anything, business as usual.


End file.
